Metzmacher, Nielsen and Shostakovich

Finnish mythology. Gentle flute tones echoing Carl Nielsen’s childhood on Funen. And a reckoning with the terrors of Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship. This concert spans vast historical landscapes, shifting moods and contrasting musical worlds as Ingo Metzmacher – conductor, artistic director, festival leader and pianist – takes the podium on The Opera House’s main stage for the first time.

Metzmacher opens the evening with En saga by Finland’s national composer Jean Sibelius. The composer himself described the tone poem as “an adventure in an inner landscape,” adding: “Psychologically, it is one of my most profound works … in no other piece have I revealed myself so completely.”

We then continue – quite literally – in our own orchestral pit, where Carl Nielsen began his career in 1889 as a second violinist. Thirty-seven years later, firmly established as one of Denmark’s most significant composers, he wrote his characterful and lyrical Concerto for Flute and Orchestra for the Royal Danish Orchestra’s Holger Gilbert Jespersen. Now, one hundred years after its premiere, the concerto is performed by Joachim Becerra Thomsen – Principal Flute of the Royal Danish Orchestra and this year’s DR P2 Artist of the Year.

The evening concludes in post-war Soviet Union. In 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, Dmitri Shostakovich completed his Symphony No. 10 – a work often interpreted as a musical journey through the terrors of dictatorship. Dark, powerful and dramatic, it nevertheless reveals, particularly in its third movement, a glimmer of hope and belief in the future – a note that may well send you out into the Copenhagen autumn night uplifted and renewed in spirit.