The first performance of Ondřej Adámek’s Follow Me in 2020 alerted the world to an exceptional composer of dazzling imagination and ferocious energy. In this subversive Violin Concerto, a soloist drives an orchestra steadily mad until the orchestra turns the tables on the soloist in what has been described as a ‘musical lynching’.
Artist-in-Residence Isabelle Faust, for whom the piece was written, is the soloist in this Norwegian premiere of the concerto, which forms a preface to one of the most profound works in the orchestra literature. Mahler’s last completed symphony is also his most contradictory: a work that encounters myriad states of horror and hopelessness before burning out in an exalted song in praise of existence. On the podium, François-Xavier Roth marshals the contrasting, conflicting and searing emotions of what many consider Mahler’s most moving piece of music.