Thu, 10. 11. 2022, 7.00 p.m.

A1 THE MAGIC OF FAIRY TALES

Venue: Zlín Congress Centre  |  Organizer: Filharmonie Bohuslava Martinů, o.p.s.  | 

A number of composers throughout history have drawn inspiration from fairy tales for their work, and it is works by Engelbert Humperdinck, Václav Trojan and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov based on folk-tale themes that make up the first of our Subscription Series A concerts.

It was in 1892 that Engelbert Humperdinck wrote his opera Hansel and Gretel, known in Czech as Jeníček a Mařenka, based on themes in the well-known tale by the Brothers Grimm about the gingerbread house. The opera's initial modest beginnings were originally written to accompany a puppet show his niece was giving at home, but he later decided to build on the work, eventually turning it into a fairy-tale singspiel in three movements in the Wagnerian Romantic style, and the piece is still one of the composer's best-known and most frequently performed works.

It's no secret that music for the accordion with orchestra accompaniment is something that many composers have tended to avoid writing, but not Václav Trojan, who had something of a soft spot for that instrument. This is demonstrated in his seven-movement Fairy Tales suite where the solo accordion combines playfully with the other instruments in a work telling the story of the princess, the brave knight, the evil dragon and the naughty merry-go-round, played by Pietro Roffi, one of the most talented European accordionists of his generation.

A fairy tale theme also served as an inspiration for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov who, at one point, became fascinated by the 1001 Nights Arabic collection of tales, fables and stories dating from the Middle Ages, and began in 1887 to compose an orchestral fantasy which he completed the following year and subsequently named Scheherazade. The complete suite comprises four movements in which the composer skilfully melded Russian folk melody with the magic of exotic-sounding oriental musicality, and the work is rightly one of the most popular and remarkable pieces of world music.