Poesy and drama with Elgar and Dvořák

Cello melancholy in Elgar and triumph in Dvořák

Imagine an entire orchestra of seasoned musicians listening intently to a 19-year-old teenager. That will be the case when South Korean Jaemin Han, born in 2006, plays Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester. The cellist came to international attention in 2021 when he won the Grand Prix at the George Enescu Competition, becoming the youngest prizewinner in its history, and going on to win ever more accolades. His discovery is all the more remarkable as the young cellist shines here in a late work that Elgar wrote during the First World War, at a difficult time in the composer’s private life, overshadowed by his wife’s illness. Instead of youthful exuberance and fighting spirit, the concerto is characterised by melancholy: the cello laments, weeps and seeks – as the cellist Daniel Müller-Schott puts it – and this is what touches us so directly about the work. The orchestra listens, joins with the soloist and then withdraws again. The sombre and tense mood of the first movement continues at the start of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, but soon bursts into freedom with a Bohemian dance in the Scherzo, ending in radiant triumph.