Fanfare by the Latvian contemporary composer Ēriks Ešenvalds will be an introduction to two fairy-tale masterpieces of Russian music. Their authors are the student and the master - in this order, because in the first part of the concert we will hear the ballet suite The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, and after the break we will hear Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The NFM Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra will be conducted by the world-famous British conductor Karel Mark Chichon.

The idea to base the new ballet on the motifs of the Russian legend of the firebird – an animal burning with living fire, the capture of which gave supernatural powers – came from the circle of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was active in France. Anatoly Lyadov, Nikolai Sokolov and Alexander Glazunov were considered candidates for creating music for the performance. The final choice fell on Stravinsky, then twenty-seven years old. The premiere of the work he composed in 1910 in Paris was a breakthrough in his career. Even before the outbreak of World War I, Diaghilev’s famous ballet company, which performed this work, managed to premiere two other ballets by the composer, which ultimately consolidated his position as one of the most courageous and innovative creators.

Certainly, Stravinsky’s skill in using musical colours in The Firebird was partly due to the private lessons he had received from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff for several years preceding the composition of this work. He, as Korsakoff’s friend Michał Martianov wrote, “understood the orchestra with all its subtleties”. Stravinsky’s teacher based Scheherazade, written in 1888, on a collection of tales from the Middle East known as The Thousand and One Nights. Alexander Glazunov related his encounter with the work: “I imagined the blue sea and the flight of a terrible bird, and festive revelry in Baghdad, and a storm during which a vessel shipwrecks – in short, everything that the author personally told me about.”