There will be three finale performances which take place from Saturday to Monday, June 7th to 9th at the Orpheum Theatre. VSO contrabassoonist Sophie Dansereau will deliver a pre-concert talk on the Saturday and Monday evenings, and Maestro Bramwell Tovey conducts.

Daniel Muller-Schott has found international acclaim for his high degree of musicality, the wealth of nuances in his playing, and his uncompromising passion for music. Mr. Muller-Schott, although a virtuoso in his own right, has also absorbed influences from his many great teachers and mentors, including Anne-Sophie Mutter, Steven Isserlis, and Heinrich Schiff.

Daniel Muller-Schott was recently featured on live television performing the Brahms Double Concerto with violinist Julia Fischer and Mozart’s Piano Trio No. 5 with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Sir Andre Previn. In high demand world-wide, Mr. Muller-Schott will be featured in concerts in Germany, Norway and Mexico in the month leading up to his performance in Vancouver. This epic season finale concert will mark Daniel Muller-Schott’s debut with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

The Dvorak Cello Concerto has taken its place as the greatest cello concerto ever written, as well as the most popular. Written during Dvorak’s three-year stint as Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, the piece received its premiere in London on March 16th, 1896.

Forty-one years after Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5 received its first public performance in Leningrad, to a resoundingly positive reception. The composer needed to have a “bounce back” piece after his emotionally brutal opera Lady Macbeth” which was met with harsh criticism by Soviet officials as the kind of “formalist” and pessimistic music that composers should not be writing. Much was at stake here, as Shostakovich would likely have been subject to a “disappearance” the like of which were commonplace in the Stalinist purges of the time. Although there was some mild grumbling by officials suspicious about the sincerity of the “apology” symphony, Shostakovich came through with flying colours. When the work had become entrenched the following year, Shostakovich had this to say about the piece: “The theme of my symphony is the making of a man. I saw man with all his experiences at the centre of the composition… In the Finale, the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and the joy of living.”

Of course, Shostakovich was no fan of Stalin and his regime, to say the least, and one wonders if in fact he was pulling something. Later on, Shostakovich’s book of memoirs (published after his death in 1975) offers a much different story than what he had said about the work in 1938 while still living under the Stalinist yoke: “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat.

It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.” But is the finale of this piece actually triumphant? Much depends on the conductor’s view of the work, and their approach to the conclusion – a faster tempo indeed makes the music sound positive, festive – a slower tempo, favoured by the composer himself (and this perhaps reveals the real answer) makes it sound like an agonized funeral march. This music says different things to different people, but its message is an important and relevant one. Shostakovich’s reaction to oppression is a complex one, resulting in complex music. It is impossible to hear it in a live concert with a full symphony orchestra and not be affected by it at an emotional level, especially such a powerful and relevant work as Symphony No.5. -- www.vancouversymphony.ca