Fidelio Orchestra: Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto – 7pm
This September, the Fidelio Orchestra presents a programme built around a single, haunting idea: what happens to the human spirit — and to music itself — under conditions of imprisonment and coercion. It's a theme that runs through every work on the bill, from Bach's much celebrated Chaconne to Viktor Ullmann's Symphony No. 2, a work by a composer who wrote it while imprisoned in Theresienstadt before he was sent to his death at Auschwitz.
At the emotional centre of the evening is Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 — a piece of soaring, defiant lyricism, brought to life by Australian violinist Catherina Lee, praised by Marin Alsop as a “beautiful musician” and mentored by Janine Jansen. The programme closes with Bach’s Chaconne in D minor, heard here in Joachim Raff’s rich orchestral arrangement, a work often read as a meditation on grief transformed into structure and beauty.
Together, these three pieces ask what it means to create — and to find freedom — inside rigid boundaries. Raffaello Morales conducts the Fidelio Orchestra in what promises to be one of the season’s most moving evenings.