Elusive notes and a string quartet

With the elusive Fourth Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich and Absolute jest by John Adams, Vasily Petrenko once again solidifies his connection with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.

Delusions of grandeur
That Dmitri Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony just before its premiere in 1936 had everything to do with Stalin and a scathing article in the Pravda. Shostakovich felt at the time that his symphony was "full of megalomania. When the work was finally premiered in the 1960s, he appeared not to have changed a note. Familiar Matineegast Vasily Petrenko, with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, shows that Shostakovich did the right thing.

String Quartet
By then the ears have been warmed by "a colossal twenty-five-minute scherzo," as John Adams called his Absolute Jest for string quartet and symphony orchestra. Written in 2012 for the centennial of the San Francisco Symphony, the work frequently references Beethoven's late string quartets. By then the Dudok Quartet, the "soloist" on duty, had already established the quartet sound with the first movement of Roukens' Fourth String Quartet, "a beautiful piece in which the finite and infinite meet," according to NRC.