Shostakovich                                     

Cello Concerto No. 1

Beethoven  

Symphony No. 3, Eroica

Boston Philharmonic Orchestra

Benjamin Zander, conductor

Andrei Ioniță, cello

Sunday, February 6, 2022
3:00 PM / Symphony Hall
Guide to the music with Benjamin Zander, 1:45 pm.

The third concert brings to us an exciting young instrumentalist, the Romanian cellist Andrei Ioniță, playing Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto. When I heard his performance of this concerto at the climax of the Final Round of the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2015, I knew Boston had to hear this profound artist—directly in line, in mastery and focused intensity, with the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom the concerto was written.

Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony seems to me the perfect complement to the concerto—one a devastating portrayal of persecution in Soviet society, the other a great essay in courage and perseverance in the face of extreme personal challenge. There is no doubt that Beethoven’s epochal “Eroica” Symphony changed music forever. It heralded a bold new musical language and a new stance of the composer toward his audience. Everything about this symphony is unprecedented: its size, range of expression, harmonic audacity, political and philosophical implications, and its demands on the orchestra.

-Benjamin Zander, conductor

“...beyond his jaw-dropping instrumental technique, Ioniță plays with a passionate intensity that is transfixing.” -Zeal NYC