Pathétique

Three works that touch the heart in very different ways because they express the unsayable: Tabita Berglund returns to the Tonkunstler Orchestra with a particularly gripping programme. Audiences first witnessed her on the podium in 2022, and since then the Norwegian conductor has been a welcome guest for both orchestra and public. Presenting Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the «Pathétique», she gives us a symphony characterised by exorbitant eruptions of emotion and abrupt mood swings. Planned by the 53-year-old composer as the cornerstone of his oeuvre, it’s a kind of requiem, an acceptance only after much struggle of his leave-taking from life. Nine days after the world premiere, the composer was dead. By contrast, «Threnody», Krzysztof Penderecki’s oppressive song of lamentation composed for string orchestra and dedicated to the victims of the first atomic bomb attack in 1945, erects a monument of public commemoration of the dead. It is followed by Arvo Pärt’s «Tabula Rasa», as it were a composed silence. The transcendental calm and inwardly directed, austere beauty likewise demand enormous concentration of musicians, albeit of a very different kind.