Long Beach Symphony presents Shostakovich's Russia

In Beethoven?s Egmont Overture, Lucas Richman, Music Director for the Knoxville and Bangor Symphonies, treats audiences to the majesty of classic Beethoven in a nine-minute stand-alone work that was written to accompany the play written by Goethe. The concert continues with a staple of the violin repertoire, Chausson?s Poème for Violin and Orchestra, with the Symphony?s own Concertmaster, Roger Wilkie, taking center stage as soloist in this rhapsodic work with tensions that ebb and flow in an advanced harmonic style. The second half of the concert features Shostakovich?s four-movement Symphony No. 5 in D minor, a work that, remarkably, found immediate favor with both Russian audiences and official critics.