The Brno Philharmonic Orchestra has prepared this week's concerts under the title Schnittke & Rachmaninoff. The programme includes two works: Alfred Schnittke's Violin Concerto No. 4 and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3 in A minor. It concludes the Dialogues Minifestival, which the Orchestra prepared for the home audience after its return from the American tour. Friday's concert will be broadcast live on Czech Radio Vltava.
The solo part will be taken by the Slovak violinist Milan Paľa, who has long been drawn to Schnittke's work and whose distinctive interpretation of 20th and 21st century music in particular promises to elevate this performance to a real event. The work was composed in 1984 for the renowned Gidon Kremer and the Berlin Philharmonic. “It is a typical example of his polystylistic compositional method. In it Schnittke plays out a drama between Good and Evil, between harmony and chaos, a drama of the conflict between centrifugal and centripetal forces, black and white, yin and yang,” said Vítězslav Mikeš, dramaturg of the Brno Philharmonic. He has included Schnittke in every season for the last ten years, making him one of the orchestra's emblematic composers. “There is a certain insistent dramaturgical regularity that has made his music widely visited, accepted and hotly debated in Brno. Schnittke is as established in Brno as perhaps no other world composer of his generation,” Mikeš said.
In the motivic material of the concerto, the composer has encoded cryptograms of several names, Kremer's own, and three of his composer friends: Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Arvo Pärt. “As with his other works, we are treated to a final catharsis, preceded by many seemingly distorted motifs. And also the typical sound of an orchestra with a large battery of percussion and keyboard instruments, in this case harpsichord, celesta and piano,” Mikeš added.
The second half of the evening belongs to Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3, one of the composer's last great works. Like Rachmaninoff's entire oeuvre, it builds on tradition and a folk basis, but excels in a more complex compositional language. “Personally, I am very much looking forward to the conclusion of our mini-festival. The audience prepared a beautiful welcome for us at the beginning. I am very grateful for the warm welcome we received last week at the From America to the Czech Republic concerts. And also for the response. During the breaks, many people came to congratulate us on our success overseas and to say that they were proud of how we represented Czech music there,” said Marie Kučerová, director of the Brno Philharmonic.
The concerts will take place on Thursday and Friday, 9 and 10 March 2023 at the Janáček Theatre, always at 19:00.
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