Details

Daniela Candillari, guest conductor

Karen Gomyo, violin

Equally at home in the opera pit and the concert stage, guest conductor Daniela Candillari debuts with the Kansas City Symphony in a program that she has carefully crafted to explore dichotomies. Opening the program, Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Reid’s Floodplain explores the dualities inherent to its namesake: rich fertility and possible danger. Resplendent with trills that suggest cascading water, Floodplain has a broad sweep — expansive, with wide vistas.

 

With its contrast of lithe melodies and aggressive athleticism, Sergei Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto is a piece filled with scrumptious angularities. Violinist Karen Gomyo plays with fiery intensity and gorgeous tone, perfectly suited for this knockout concerto, one of the best ever written for the instrument. It’s a perfect match.

 

Like so much of Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, his Tenth Symphony is filled with ambiguity — or is it? By some accounts, it included a portrait of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin while others have found no such connection. It’s up to you to decide what you hear in this profoundly compelling and massive symphony. Moments of delicate intimacy contrast with frenzied explosions of sound. Of course, you’ll hear Shostakovich’s musical monogram — and so much else — in one of the 20th century’s great symphonic works.