ASO Masterworks: The Emperor & the Revolutionary

Welcoming back Birmingham’s favorite pianist, Joyce Yang, to the stage with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra for a season finale led by Resident Conductor Christopher Confessore, pairing two of music’s most commanding works. Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto — the “Emperor” — is a monument of the concerto repertoire, opening with a cadenza of almost shocking boldness before settling into one of Beethoven’s most serene slow movements. Yang, one of today’s most acclaimed interpreters of the standard repertoire, brings both technical brilliance and musical depth to the keyboard. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony closes the program on an even grander scale — a work written under Stalin’s shadow that somehow manages to be both defiant and devastating. The evening opens with Glinka’s overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila, brilliant and fleet-footed, a perfect curtain-raiser.