Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Present "Frozen Dreams"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 03 February 2026 14:49

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee.

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025, I had the privilege to attend a sterling concert presented by Carnegie Hall and performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra led by the eminent Manfred Honeck.

The event started promisingly with an admirable account of Lena Auerbach’s compelling, somewhat mysterious Frozen Dreams, commissionedby this ensemble and heard here in its New York premiere. Below is the composer’s own comment on the work:

Music exists in a paradox: It is both frozen and ephemeral, tangible and elusive. The act of composition is an attempt to capture something that is already dissolving. My orchestral work Frozen Dreams emerges from this paradox, reimagining the sound world of my earlier Frozen Dreams for string quartet (2020) and expanding it into an orchestral landscape that explores the fragility of perception and the shifting nature of reality itself. As I returned to this material, I found myself drawn to the idea that an event becomes fully real only when it is perceived—an idea that resonates, in a poetic sense, with aspects of quantum realities. Music unfolds as a wide field of potentialities, taking on a unique shape for each listening ear.

Orchestration is, in many ways, an exploration of this uncertainty. What happens when sound, once confined to the four voices of a string quartet, is stretched across the vast sonic universe of an orchestra? Does it retain its essence, or does it become something else entirely? Here, we confront the deeply personal and subjective experience of perception. No two listeners will hear Frozen Dreams in the same way, just as no two dreams are identical. A chord might sound luminous to one listener, foreboding to another. A silence might be filled with anticipation, or with loss. The orchestra, with its myriad colors and shifting densities, becomes a dreamscape in which meaning is perpetually in flux.

We often think of memories as something fixed, securely behind us, but they are as fluid as the dreams that shape them. In a poetic sense, we are always “remembering the future,” allowing our subconscious to blend past and future into the present. In Frozen Dreams, musical ideas resurface like echoes of something once known, or yet to be—blurring the boundaries of time. A theme emerges, vanishes, then returns changed—as if recalled from a dream, yet belonging to a moment still waiting to unfold.

Though the title Frozen Dreams suggests stasis, this work is, at its core, about movement—about the delicate tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, between what is possible and what is inevitable. It is a meditation on the way time is layered in our minds: past, present, and future coexisting in an endless spiral. Perhaps, in the end, this music does not seek to answer the questions it poses. Instead, it invites the listener to dwell within them—to step into the dream and, for a fleeting moment, let the boundaries of time and self dissolve.

The composer was present to receive the audience’s acclaim.

A remarkable pianist, Seong-Jin Cho, then entered the stage for a dazzling account of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s fabulous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, from 1934. The composer wrote to the renowned choreographer Mikhail Fokine about the scenario for a 1937 ballet based on the piece:

Why not resurrect the legend about Paganini, who, for the perfection of his art and for a woman, sold his soul to an evil spirit? All the variations which have the theme of Dies Irae [nos. 7, 10, and 24] represent the evil spirit. The variations from No. 11 to No. 18 are love episodes. Paganini himself appears in the “theme” (his first appearance) and again, for the last time, in variation No. 23. The evil spirit appears for the first time in variation No. 7. Variations nos. 8, 9, and 10 are the development of the evil spirit. Variation No. 11 is the turning point into the domain of love. Variation No. 12—the Menuet—portrays the first appearance of the woman. Variation No. 13 is the first conversation between the woman and Paganini. Variation No. 19—Paganini’s triumph.

Enthusiastic applause elicited a terrific encore from the soloist: Frédéric Chopin’s astonishingly beautiful Waltz in C-sharp Minor, Op. 64, No. 2.

However, the second half of the evening was even more impressive: an awesome rendition of Dmitri Shostakovich’s extraordinary Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47, from 1937. In an official publication three months after the premiere of the work, the composer wrote: 

The theme of my Symphony is the stabilization of the personality. In the center of this composition—conceived lyrically from beginning to end—I saw a man with all his experiences. The Finale resolves the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements into optimism and joy of living.

In the much later Testimony, Shostakovich offered a contrasting interpretation:

I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the [finale of the] Fifth Symphony. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that … People who came to the premiere of the Fifth in the best of moods wept.

The initial, Moderato movement begins dramatically, ushering in a mood of great solemnity; in the ensuing development section, a sinister march is the vehicle for music of great intensity that builds to a powerful climax before subsiding for a recapitulation of the more irenic, second theme encountered in the movement’s first part—the movement closes with a hushed coda. The succeeding scherzo, marked Allegretto, is characteristically playful and often stirring; a contrasting Trio is sometimes dance-like in its rhythms—the movement ends abruptly and emphatically. The Largo it precedes is plaintive, lugubrious but also passionate if with meditative moments sometimes of extreme quiet; it concludes very softly. (According to the notes on the program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda, the legendary conductor Serge Koussevitzky thought it “to be the greatest symphonic slow movement since Beethoven.”) The finale—its tempo is Allegro non troppo—is propulsive and exciting for much of its length but with a more fraught, subdued and largely pessimistic middle section; it closes stunningly and magnificently.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.