Undercurrents | Frost Symphony Orchestra

The Frost Symphony Orchestra brings its season to a close with a program that reaches into one of music history’s most charged chapters. The evening opens with Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, a work of torrential energy and daunting technical demands, performed by Frost professor Naoko Takao, praised for her compelling lyricism and fearless virtuosity. Reconstructed after its original manuscript was lost in 1917, the concerto moves from sardonic wit to volcanic outburst across its four movements. After intermission, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor takes the stage, completed in the uneasy months following Stalin’s death in 1953. Widely interpreted as both a musical portrait of the dictator and a reckoning with years of artistic repression, the symphony travels from bleak introspection through sardonic waltz and relentless scherzo to a blazing, hard-won affirmation. Together, the two works chart a journey from individual struggle to collective catharsis, under the baton of conductor Gerard Schwarz. The program also opens with Ravel’s Alborada del Gracioso.