About the Concert
To call his own symphony "The Indelible" is undoubtedly daring; after all, it could be misinterpreted as self-praise. But Nielsen did not mean it that way. His Fourth is above all a work about the ineradicability of hope and life. He wrote it in the middle of the First World War, and the fact that he deals with violence in it can be heard not least in the finale, where the two separately positioned timpani groups fight a real duel. Shostakovich's Cello Concerto, on the other hand, is more introverted; he composed it for his friend, the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. We have Alisa Weilerstein playing it, who even met Rostropovich personally in order to understand Shostakovich's work even better.