one intermission
Mikhail Tatarnikov, Music Director and Chief Conductor of NOVAT, presents a new program for the Grand Symphony Concert.
You will hear the works of three great composers of the first half of the 20th century – Schoenberg, Ravel and Stravinsky. Each of them changed the musical language of his time, forming a unique shape of the era.
In the first part, the orchestra will perform one of the most striking pieces of the early period of Arnold Schoenberg's creative activity, written under the impression of Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). The music tells a story of love, forgiveness and transformation, where night becomes a symbol of purification. Schoenberg still retains a connection with the Late Romanticism – the composition is permeated with romantic expression, the most subtle psychological nuances, but its language already foreshadows the future of musical modernism. Transfigured Night was written in 1899 for a string sextet, in 1917 the piece was revised for a string orchestra, and it is in this version that the composition will be performed at the concert.
Reflections on the death of the epoch are drawn by the choreographic poem for orchestra La valse by Maurice Ravel, written by him in 1919-1920. Conceived as a tribute to Johann Strauss and the Viennese waltz tradition and commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, the French composer's work radically rethinks the genre of the waltz in itself. The grace of the dance disintegrates into irony, anxiety and chaos. The music seems to lose its stability, and by the end the waltz turns into something frightening. Many critics see it as an allegory of the destroyed world of Old Europe – solemn but doomed, along with which the dance itself loses its balance, it collapses along with the world that gave birth to it. According to Ravel himself, it is “a waltz as a vision, not as a ballet”.
The second part will feature music for Igor Stravinsky's famous ballet The Firebird, commissioned by Diaghilev in 1910 for the Russian Seasons in Paris. The composer's first ballet was enthusiastically received by the public and brought him great success, opening the way to world recognition. In The Firebird, a fascinating story based on Russian folk tales and legends is embodied in a brilliant orchestration that combines magic, solemnity, expression and folklore intonations.