Spring Concert

Henley Symphony Orchestra

Conductor: Ian BrownPiano: Peter Donohoe

Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1
Shostakovich: Symphony No 5

For our annual Hexagon concert, we welcome the pianist Peter Donohoe to play Brahms’s mighty Piano Concerto No 1. Peter needs little introduction: in the years since his unprecedented success as Silver Medal winner of the 1982 7th International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, he has built an extraordinary world-wide career, encompassing a huge repertoire. He is acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for his musicianship, stylistic versatility and commanding technique. The concert culminates with Shostakovich’s most-played, but ambiguous, Symphony No 5, whose triumphant finale can be heard as either political protest or capitulation to Stalin’s Soviet regime.