Oxford Millennium Orchestra: Shostakovich 10 and Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

Conductor Joe Davies conducting the Oxford Millennium Orchestra in an evening-lit Sheldonian Theatre

Felix Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto in E minor

Dimitri Shostakovich - Symphony No. 10

Violin - Violetta Suvini

Conductor - Joe Davies

The final concerto that Mendelssohn ever wrote, the Violin Concerto in E Minor shows the violin at its best. Unusually, the soloist opens the concerto in dramatic, soaring fashion, and from then on the violin is in beautiful dialogue with the orchestra, often in an almost speech-like manner.

Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony premiered in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1953, just months after Stalin’s death, and is often seen as the composer’s musical reflection upon the repressions and horrors of the previous decades. Shostakovich frequently trod the fine line between working within the Soviet authority’s cultural constraints and pushing beyond these boundaries, and his 10th Symphony embodies some of this unease and duality, much like it operates both on the broader sociocultural plane and at the depths of the composer’s innermost emotions.

The Oxford Millennium Orchestra, comprised of university undergraduates, postgraduates, and staff, as well as members of the wider Oxford community, is an ambitious and exciting large-scale symphony orchestra, with recent critically-acclaimed performances of Mahler 3, Mahler 7, Shostakovich 5, and Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie fantastique’. The orchestra is known for its big, bold, and daring performances, and its most recent concert in the Sheldonian was described by ‘Seen and Heard International’ as ‘thrilling’, ‘gloriously emphatic’, ‘palpable and dynamic’.

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