Wounded Hearts at Napier Municipal Theatre

Under the baton of Sistema student and prize-winning Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, this concert explores passion and pain. Schumann’s Manfred Overture draws us deep into Lord Byron’s dramatic world. Then we turn to the real drama of life in Stalinist Russia that so strenuously affected Prokofiev. Despite this, his Sinfonia Concertante is compelling in the hands of extraordinary cellist Alisa Weilerstein, whose youthful energy and poetic expression are captivating. The music of Mahler is fashioned on a grander scale. ‘A symphony should be like the world’, he said, ‘it must contain everything’. Certainly his First Symphony, The Titan, achieves this. In contrast, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, Pathétique, is a master class in exquisite torment where soaring melodies are unable to shake a sense of despair.