Thu, 13. 10. 2022, 7.00 p.m.

B1 CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS

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

Our Subscription Series B opening concert is themed around the world of animals and animal inspiration in the music of the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries. Joining the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Orchestra on stage tonight are the pianists Daniel Wiesner and Miroslav Sekera with the Slovak conductor František Macek at the podium.

It was in 1912 that the Parisian composer Albert Roussel wrote his ballet-pantomime using music and dance to depict everyday life in the insect world, calling it the Spider's Feast. It tells the story of a hungry spider that lures into its sticky web a mantis, a mayfly, ants, a butterfly and a dung beetle. The work, with its unusual orchestration, is the first piece in tonight's concert and is played in the concert version.

The next piece is The Wasps, Ralph Vaughan Williams' orchestral overture to Aristophanes' play of the same name. Written in 1909, the roughly ten-minute overture is not a literal musical representation of wasps, apart from a few opening bars imitating the buzzing of a wasps' nest. The piece became very popular and features quite often in concert programmes around the world.

Our concert ends with Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals, to which the composer appended the epithet "Great Zoological Fantasy". The piece was originally written to amuse the composer's closest friends, and when he was subsequently asked to perform it in public he categorically refused, fearing that he would damage his reputation, but he did allow the piece, which has 14 movements, to be published after his death, and paradoxically it is today one of Saint-Saëns' best-known works, appealing to young and old alike.