Concert Muti

Concert Muti

Concert Muti

Europakonzert Riccardo Muti and the Berliner Philharmoniker in Bari

With its brick-red façade, a gleaming white entrance area and a magnificent red and gold auditorium, the venue for this year’s European Concert, Bari’s Teatro Petruzzelli, is an architectural jewel. Under the direction of Riccardo Muti, the Berliner Philharmoniker will present a mixed programme of Italian and German music. Rossini’s rousing William Tell Overture and the atmospheric ballet music from Verdi’s opera The Sicilian Vespers exude Italianità. Completing the programme, the dusky mixture of yearning and consolation in Brahms’ Second Symphony make the work a seminal example of late German Romanticism.

Symphonic Concert

Karen Gomyo, photo: Gabrielle Revere It is generally accepted that short pieces performed at the beginning of symphonic concerts play the role of a kind of overture (even if they are not overtures in the strict sense of the word). What, then, is the function of the composition Ceci n'est pas une ouverture [This is not an overture], written a dozen years ago by Paweł Szymański for the Warsaw Philharmonic and the Polish Composers' Union? Perhaps similar to French surrealist René Magritte’s famous painting signed Ceci n'est pas une pipe, which depicts nothing but a pipe. Szymanski's thrilling piece conjures up the image of a laboratory technician dissecting classical scores in front of an audience in the anatomical theatre he has built. Sergei Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony, on the other hand, provides a fascinating answer to the question of how Joseph Haydn might have composed if a time machine had transported him to the twentieth century. Another great composer writing at the beginning of the last century took an imaginary journey (this time in space). Ibéria, the middle and longest movement in Claude Debussy’s Images cycle, is regarded as one of the great musical evocations of Spain, although the composer was never fated to visit the country. Max Bruch, who was already old at the time, reportedly found it difficult to come to terms with the end of romanticism. His Violin Concerto No. 1, composed while Johannes Brahms was still alive, was so successful that hardly anyone noticed that the German composer had written two others!

Symphonic Concert

Michał Nesterowicz, photo: Łukasz Rajchert He jokingly says that he loves the Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall as much as he hates it. He knew it much better than many Polish artists long before he first came to Warsaw. In order to follow the live broadcasts of the Chopin Competition in his country, he had to get up at 3.00 a.m. He longed to one day stand on the stage where Martha Argerich and Kristian Zimmerman won the competition. That dream of performing in Warsaw came true in 2015, when Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho triumphed in the Chopin Competition. He now returns to the capital’s stage as the soloist in Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major. Brahms used to refer to his powerful work, which posed a considerable challenge for both pianist and orchestra, as a ‘little concerto’. Shortly after the premiere, however, it was more appropriately labelled a ‘symphony with obbligato piano part’. This grand Romantic concerto will be followed by a true Romantic symphony. One of Anton Bruckner’s more popular works, his Fourth Symphony is regarded as one of the finest musical contemplations of nature. Although it does not have a clearly defined literary programme, the composer wove into it the sounds of the morning, the sounds of nature – including the singing of a tit or a mountain echo – and of hunting.

Chamber Concert

The BRSO’s chamber music programs center on works whose unusual instrumentation has prevented them from being frequently performed in concerts. One such work is pianist Viktor Derevianko’s arrangement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony for piano trio and three percussionists, which creates an exciting timbral and rhythmic alternative to Shostakovich’s original. The Fifteenth Symphony is Shostakovich’s last contribution to the symphonic genre, and is considered to be an eloquent summation of his artistic life. Shostakovich references music of the past with quotations from Rossini and Wagner. The concert will commence with Anton Arensky’s rarely performed Piano Trio, composed in 1894: it is an unjustly neglected masterpiece that is in no way inferior to the compositions of German Romanticism. And Serbian percussionist and composer Nebojša Jovan Živković composed the percussion trio “Trio per uno” to showcase his favorite instruments. This is a program full of discoveries for inquisitive music lovers.

Chamber Concert

The BRSO’s chamber music programs center on works whose unusual instrumentation has prevented them from being frequently performed in concerts. One such work is pianist Viktor Derevianko’s arrangement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony for piano trio and three percussionists, which creates an exciting timbral and rhythmic alternative to Shostakovich’s original. The Fifteenth Symphony is Shostakovich’s last contribution to the symphonic genre, and is considered to be an eloquent summation of his artistic life. Shostakovich references music of the past with quotations from Rossini and Wagner. The concert will commence with Anton Arensky’s rarely performed Piano Trio, composed in 1894: it is an unjustly neglected masterpiece that is in no way inferior to the compositions of German Romanticism. And Serbian percussionist and composer Nebojša Jovan Živković composed the percussion trio “Trio per uno” to showcase his favorite instruments. This is a program full of discoveries for inquisitive music lovers.

Chamber Concert

The sequence of fourths in Schönberg’s First Chamber Symphony represents a “fanfare of new music”: it marks both a decisive moment in which the extended tonality of late Romanticism was on the verge of dissolving and a turning point for the “dissonant experimenter,” who was proud of this work. But success did not come: “There is nothing I long for more intensely than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky. Or if anything more, that people should know my melodies and whistle them.” With his Archduke Trio, on the other hand, Beethoven gazes far into the 19th century. However, the premiere in April 1814 marked the end of his performing career; it was his last concert as a pianist. And what about Reinecke? Perhaps the audience has to make a choice here. According to BRSO flautist Henrik Wiese, “you simply have to open your ears and heart, and let this music work its magic.”

Chamber Concert

The sequence of fourths in Schönberg’s First Chamber Symphony represents a “fanfare of new music”: it marks both a decisive moment in which the extended tonality of late Romanticism was on the verge of dissolving and a turning point for the “dissonant experimenter,” who was proud of this work. But success did not come: “There is nothing I long for more intensely than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky. Or if anything more, that people should know my melodies and whistle them.” With his Archduke Trio, on the other hand, Beethoven gazes far into the 19th century. However, the premiere in April 1814 marked the end of his performing career; it was his last concert as a pianist. And what about Reinecke? Perhaps the audience has to make a choice here. According to BRSO flautist Henrik Wiese, “you simply have to open your ears and heart, and let this music work its magic.”

Symphonic Concert

Maxime Pascal, photo: Nieto ‘Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside’ – that is the title of the first movement (Allegro non troppo) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. As we learn from letters he sent to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel in 1808, the composer had serious doubts about whether the individual movements of the work should be given names containing such unambiguous pictorial suggestions. In the end, he not only retained them, but found it necessary to include next to the work’s title Pastoral Symphony, or Recollection of Life in the Countryside a caveat in brackets: An expression of feelings rather than painting. The composer’s joy and affirmative attitude to nature – the rustling of leaves, the murmur of streams, the singing of birds, the thunder, lightning and rain all translated into sound in this programmatic work – still leave no one indifferent today, delighting listeners with the deep connection to nature. André Gide’s poetic play Perséphone, written in the spirit of French Parnassianism, is based on a theme taken from Homer’s Hymn to Demeter. The Nobel Prize-winning text caught the attention of the famous dancer Ida Rubinstein, who asked Igor Stravinsky to write music to it. Out of the planned ‘symphonic ballet’ arose a genre combining dance, mime, singing and recitation in an orchestral setting. It was premiered without much fanfare on the stage of the Paris Opera on 30 April 1934. Many years later, Stravinsky's melodrama attracted the interest of many choreographers, including Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Janine Charrat, Martha Graham, and in 2012 Peter Sellars directed this production at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Today, this work is not infrequently performed in a concert version, which the Warsaw Philharmonic ensembles, with renowned artists and the Artos children’s choir, will present on our stage for the first time. Judith Chemla will perform the part of Persephone in Stravinsky's piece, replacing Marina Hands.