One of the most sought-after orchestras in the UK, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, enjoying the patronage of King Charles III, will play together with the South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim – the youngest ever winner of the International Van Cliburn Piano Competition. The musicians will be led by the orchestra’s Artistic Director Vasily Petrenko. We will listen to works by Antonin Dvořák, Frederic Chopin and Bela Bartók, and the affirmation of life will be the common thread of all the works presented.
Dvořák’s Carnival Overture, which opens the evening, is filled with a breathtaking atmosphere of celebration. The composition is part of a symphonic triptych devoted to nature, but ultimately the composer decided to divide it into three separate pieces. The Prague premiere of the second of them – Carnival – was for the Czech artist a farewell to his homeland before travelling to the United States. He also welcomed America with this work – it was included in the programme of the first concert on that side of the Atlantic, during which, in 1892, Dvořák led the orchestra at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Frederic Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is a piece with a much more ambiguous mood. It was created under the influence of the nineteen-year-old composer’s feelings for the singer Konstancja Gładkowska. It is kept in the virtuoso brillant style, which Chopin learned best from Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
Bela Bartok’s vitalistic musical style can be treated as a praise of life, also in its most instinctive manifestations. The extremely colourful Concerto for Orchestra is, paradoxically, one of the Bartok’s last works. It was created when the artist was already in exile in the United States. It features both Central European folk motifs and sharp rhythms. Its most famous fragment is the fourth movement, which contains a parody of one of the themes of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, which Bartók heard on the radio and which he apparently hated.
The concert is held under the patronage of the Embassy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
