ConcertPulse
Spain tour: Madrid
"A journey is like drinking from the fountain of life." (Friedrich Hebbel) This season, we are finally heading back to the Iberian Peninsula! We will be taking some fascinating scores with us, including a spiritual composition by Arvo Pärt, who writes in a unique "tintinnabuli style" and once described "ideal polyphony" as a "ceaseless prayer”. He was commissioned to write the meditative Berlin Mass in 1990 to mark the 90th German Catholic Congress, which was held in the city and had “On earth as it is in heaven” from the Lord’s Prayer as its motto. We will also be playing one of the four overtures to Beethoven's "Fidelio". This opera revolves around a Spanish nobleman’s liberation by his wife Leonore and has been praised as "one of the greatest creations of the human mind”. Stravinsky's magnificent 1931 Violin Concerto is marked by a distinctive chord that he called the work's "passport”, and that is “shown” accordingly at the beginning of each movement. While the concerto is inspired by the baroque, it updates this style whimsically, bringing it into the 20th century. Patricia Kopatchinskaja is the perfect soloist to interpret this tongue-in-cheek tour de force. We will also present Dvořák's famous Ninth Symphony, in which he sent yearning musical greetings to his homeland during his 1893 sojourn in the "New World". This monumental culmination of his symphonic oeuvre features a rich network of themes and motifs. One critic said of the Ninth that it was "American in spirit, but Czech in atmosphere”, for "Dvořák is no more able to change his nationality than a leopard its spots."