Kristiina Poska directs Beethoven, Shostakovitch and Erkki-Sven Tüür

From the turmoil of conflict and defiance against oppression – to the blazing flames of joy.

Join award-winning Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for a concert of high drama and deep emotion.

It wasn’t Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that inspired Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, though the music tells the same story – of one man’s struggles between conflict and love – in some of the composer’s fieriest music. Shostakovich, by contrast, wrote his Eighth String Quartet – which he later enlarged into his Chamber Symphony – at a time of great oppression from the Soviet state. It’s impossible not to feel profoundly moved by its music of pathos, struggle and furious determination.

Poska’s compatriot Erkki-Sven Tüür burns away the turmoil with the purifying fire of his dazzling Flamma. The concert ends with Beethoven’s sunniest, most freewheeling symphony – written in tribute to the power of optimism in the face of his encroaching deafness.