IRL - Dublin

Richard Strauss Don Juan 
Mozart Clarinet Concerto 
Bartók Concerto for Orchestra

National Symphony Orchestra
Alexander Shelley, conductor
Sebastian Manz, clarinet

A life in three episodes: summer splendour from Richard Strauss, autumnal reflection from Mozart, and Bartók’s orchestral showcase moving from winter chill to spring-like ebullience.

Conductor Alexander Shelley, ‘a natural communicator, both on and off the podium’ (Daily Telegraph), leads the National Symphony Orchestra and multi-award-winning Sebastian Manz, the first clarinettist in 40 years to win the prestigious ARD International Music Competition in his native Germany, in three thrilling masterpieces.

Taking delight in a youthful virtuosity that all but boils over with incident, drama and wit, Richard Strauss’s heroic, swashbuckling tone poem Don Juan boasts enormous vim and irresistible vitality.

Fast-forward through the years, and Mozart’s haunting Clarinet Concerto, composed just weeks before his all too early death, is surely the finest ever written for the instrument. Elegant, graceful and sophisticated, it is Mozart at his most inspired, exhilarating and moving.

Bartók’s astonishing Concerto for Orchestra, a showcase opportunity for each orchestral section to try to out-do the other, is a thrills-and-spills rollercoaster ride that eventually concludes with stirring memories of Hungarian folk melodies and a quotation from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. The result is an exhilarating and emotion-filled extravaganza.