Thu, 4. 5. 2023, 7.00 p.m.

B7 GLITTER OF ROMANTICISM

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

Our last Subscription Series B concert on 4th May features the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic's Principal Trumpeter Pavel Skopal Jr. with chief conductor Robert Kružík at the podium.

The concert opens with Brahms' Academic Festival Overture, the first of two contrasting concert overtures he wrote in summer 1880. This first was in gratitude to the University of Breslau for awarding him an honorary degree. This spirited piece, as the name tells us, makes reference to the world of academia and it is no surprise, then, that it quotes a number of student songs, the best-known of which is probably the last, Gaudeamus igitur.

Rather less is known about the life and musical legacy of the German-Russian composer and trumpeter Oskar Böhme than about Brahms. Böhme came from Saxony but left for St Petersburg as a young man, where he played the cornet in the Mariinsky Theatre there, and subsequently taught the trumpet. His only trumpet concerto, which was written before he left for Russia, was very well received and as one of few trumpet concertos of the Romantic period, it soon became part of the standard repertoire and is still played regularly today thanks to its delightful motifs.

"My second symphony is a confession of the soul," Sibelius once said about the piece that follows after the break. The work came about in no small part due to the composer's long-standing friend and supporter Baron Axel Carpelan, who persuaded Sibelius to go to Italy where he would learn about balance and harmony, and it was there in winter 1901 that the first elements of the second symphony were composed. The work was completed a few months later back in Finland, and perhaps that accounts for its contrasting moods with the idyllic atmosphere of southern climes alternating with the melancholy of the north.