6th Symphony Concert

Jörg Widmann’s concert overture *Con brio* provides a lively opening to the 6th Symphony Concert. The piece was composed in 2008 at the suggestion of Mariss Jansons, who asked the world-renowned clarinetist and composer to create a work inspired by Beethoven’s 7th and 8th Symphonies. “After some respectful hesitation,” Widmann agreed, but approached Beethoven not through direct quotations, but through structural and tonal affinities. The title Con brio (“lively,” “with verve”) refers directly to Beethoven, who used this tempo marking on several occasions, not least in the energetic finale of his Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, which takes center stage in the second part of the concert. While Carl Maria von Weber would have gladly sent Beethoven to the “madhouse” for this symphony, Richard Wagner enthusiastically called it the “apotheosis of dance”—and indeed, this symphony, like no other by Beethoven, is permeated by rousing dance rhythms.

Before the intermission, Richard Strauss’s Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra in D major will be performed, one of his final works, composed in Switzerland in 1945 after the end of the war. In classical form and with the transparency of chamber music, it combines a late-Romantic musical language with an almost Mozartian lightness. The oboe, played by the TSOI’s long-time principal oboist, Konrad Zeller, acts as a narrative voice in a finely balanced dialogue with the orchestra, conducted by Ainārs Rubiķis.