Pittsburgh Symphony Ends Its 2024-2025 Classical Season with Three Disparate Works

Composer Lera Auerbach Taking a Bow with Maestro Honek after a Performance of Her "Frozen Dreams"

    The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra closed out its 2024-2025 classical 

music season today (Sunday, June 15) with three works that could hardly be 

more dissimilar.

          The first, a commissioned work titled “Frozen Dreams” is by Russian-born Lera Auerbach. A “reimagining” of her earlier “Frozen Dreams” for string quartet, this expansion into an orchestral landscape calls for a number of unique percussive items and opens with the scraping of two friction mallets (used in sound healing practices) across a tam-tam to produce “otherworldly sounds.”

In the program booklet, Auerbach s quoted as saying “Though the title “Frozen Dreams” suggests stasis, this work is, at its core, about movement – about the delicate tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, between what is possible and what is inevitable. It is a meditation on the way time is layered in our minds; past, present and future coexisting in an endless spiral.”

Beatrice Rana After Soloing in Mendelssohn's Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra

The second piece, Felix Mendelssohn’s “Concerto No. 1 in G minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 25,” brought pianist Beatrice Rana to the Heinz Hall stage for the first time since 2022. Dressed in a long black and gold gown, Rana immediately showed her strength in a lively first movement but also demonstrated a more sensitive side in the lushly gorgeous second movement Andante.

Throughout the entire work, I was impressed with how Maestro Honeck balanced the power of the orchestra with the melody coming from the piano. The volume of both was perfectly matched in a very complimentary way.

Called back on stage for three bows, Rana pleased the audience with a virtuosic encore that ended in such an unexpected abrupt way that it made me chuckle with delight.

The final piece on the program was Dmitri Shostakovich’s masterful Tenth Symphony, written to capture the essence of the Stalin years and the dictator’s repressive regime. Somber and brooding with moments of terror and horror, the music took me to moods I’d never before experienced. The second movement, the scherzo, in the words of the composer, constitutes “a portrait of Stalin.”

The musicians of the PSO played this complex work impressively, masterfully and passionately. It was certainly a gem meant to be heard and savored.