The opening concert of the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra will be conducted by its new Artistic Director, violinist and conductor Alexander Sitkovetsky, who took his first steps in music under the guidance of Yehudi Menuhin. The programme includes compositions by Felix Mendelssohn, Max Bruch and Rodion Shchedrin.

The first piece will be Felix Mendelssohn Tenth Symphony in B minor for strings. This one-movement work is part of his thirteen early symphonies. They were composed between 1821 and 1823, when Mendelssohn was between twelve and fourteen years old! The Tenth Symphony is divided into sections that contrast with each other in terms of tempo and expression. It opens with a slow, meditative introduction, followed by a faster-paced section, which accelerates even more in the finale. In his early works, Mendelssohn was fixated on Classical models: the works of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but this youthful symphony cannot be denied great melodic invention and charm.

Then we will listen to the Concerto in G minor, the most popular composition by Max Bruch, an author belonging to the same generation as Johannes Brahms, Edvard Grieg and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The work was written in 1866, when the artist was twenty-eight years old. Although Bruch wrote two more violin concertos, none of them matched the popularity of this early composition, full of joy and great charm. It is light, sunny, energetic, definitely more lyrical than showy. The evening will end with the Carmen Suite for strings and percussion. Its author is Rodion Shchedrin, who used here the thematic material of Georges Bizet’s opera. The Russian composer wrote it for his wife, the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre, Maya Plisetskaya. The result is an extremely colourful and accessible work. Bizet’s melodies are perfectly recognizable in it but transformed in a very ingenious way – thanks to intriguing instrumentation, changes of registers, playing with colours or shifting accents, they give the impression of something new. Shchedrin’s arrangement, full of humour and invention, quickly gained great popularity.