Wed, 20. 11. 2024, 19.00 hrs

B3 NORTHERN MOSAIC

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

This November concert highlights music from northern Europe and works by three composers considered founders of their national music in their native countries.

In 1857 Bedřich Smetana visited Franz Liszt in Weimar, and beyond their inspiring personal encounter it was there that he first became directly acquainted with the symphonic poem form, which combines musical language with non-musical imagery, a concept that Smetana found fascinating. Strongly influenced by this experience, he then conceived the idea of creating a composition on a similar basis. At the time, Smetana was based in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he worked for five years as director of the Philharmonic Society and as a music teacher, and it was in southern Sweden that he wrote three programmatic pieces in the style of Liszt's symphonic poems, inspired by historical themes drawn from Anglo-Saxon and Czech history and Norse mythology. One of these was Wallenstein's Camp, a symphonic portrayal of early evening, night and morning in a military camp, and this is the piece that opens the concert.

Jean Sibelius, undoubtedly one of Finland’s most outstanding composers, played the violin from an early age and at one stage even aspired to a career as a violin virtuoso, so it is not surprising that in 1899 he conceived the idea of writing a concerto for violin and orchestra. He began work on it in 1902, and in the following year his now legendary Violin Concerto in D Minor reached its final form. The work, with its great emotional drive and touches of the frozen north, is played by Milan Al-Ashhab, laureate of the prestigious Fritz Kreisler International Violin Competition in Vienna, and of the prominent New York Concert Artists and Associates.

Norway is represented by that country’s greatest composer Edvard Grieg, with the second half of the concert featuring his Symphonic Dances, a four-part romantic cycle interwoven with Norwegian folk themes and folk songs.