Ye­arning

Torn between his forbidden love for Josef Kotek, his unfulfilled marriage to Antonina Ivanovna and devotion to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky composed a symphony, his 4th, which memorably reflects the composer’s own quest for a way out of his quandary. The legend of Icarus is a story of setting out and failure. In her remarkable orchestral piece Lera Auerbach is caught up in a longing for the unattainable. There is a certain melancholy about Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, which he completed shortly before his death. Sharon Kam, one of the world’s leading clarinetists, plays Mozart’s masterpiece on a basset clarinet as originally intended.