Great Classics

LISTEN TO SAMPLES

Use < > buttons to scroll tracks - see below for listings.

Ashkenazy says it’s not just interesting but right to play the music of Richard Strauss alongside Mahler. They could have been rivals, but were friends, even though musically, as Mahler put it, they were like miners, tunnelling from opposite sides and “meeting on their subterranean ways”.

From one side this concert unearths the overture from Strauss’s first opera and strikes a seam of witty allusion in the virtuoso Burleske for piano and orchestra. From the other side comes Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, making its way from the sombre tread of a funeral march to the ecstasy of its finale. But our hearts are won by the musical declaration of love embraced by these two extremes: the Symphony’s Adagietto, in which strings and harp give voice to a wordless passion.

R STRAUSS Guntram: Prelude to Act 1
R STRAUSS Burleske for piano and orchestra
MAHLER Symphony No.5

Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor
Clemens Leske piano

PRE-CONCERT TALKS

Free pre-concert talk by Raff Wilson in the Northern Foyer, 45 minutes before each concert.

AUDIO PLAYER LISTING

Track 1 – R STRAUSS Burleske for piano and orchestra: excerpt
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Herbert Blomstedt
DECCA 480 0404
Track 2 – MAHLER Symphony No.5: 1st movement (Funeral March)
Track 3 – MAHLER Symphony No.5: 3rd movement (Scherzo)
Track 4 – MAHLER Symphony No.5: 4th movement (Adagietto)
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik.
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 463 738-2

Audio kindly supplied by Universal Music.

Currently available from iTunes:
Strauss Burleske
Mahler

We’re ushering in the Sydney summer with Mahler’s Third Symphony – his sunniest symphony of all. “The finale is just unbelievably uplifting,” says Ashkenazy, “and no one, not even the most pessimistic person, will be able to resist it.” But before the music arrives at that glorious conclusion, radiant in its affirmation of love, it traces a musical journey inspired by nature and the dream of a summer morning.

It’s an expansive, all-embracing symphony that finds as much meaning in a dainty meadow flower as in the voices of angels. This, said Mahler, is a symphony that wakes from unfathomable silence and sings and rings!

Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor
Lilli Paasikivi mezzo-soprano
Ladies of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Sydney Children’s Choir

Pre-concert talk by David Garrett in the Northern Foyer, 45 minutes before each performance.

** Customer Service Notice : Mahler 3 with the SSO **
Please note there will be NO interval at the Sydney Symphony’s performances of Mahler’s Third Symphony on 2, 3 and 4 December. The concert will last approximately 1 hr 45 mins. Latecomers will be admitted only after Part I, approximately 35 mins after the start of the concert.
We encourage you to arrive in good time to avoid missing the first part of the concert.

Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saëns, Khachaturian – these are the composers who give us orchestral colour, sweeping melodies and vibrant exoticism, the composers who temper Germanic convention with brilliance and fantasy. Which all makes for a perfect match when we bring a Russian conductor and a French soloist together to perform vividly imagined music with an Oriental cast.

Let your imagination loose on the tender Adagio and thrilling dances that accompany Spartacus’s uprising. Surrender to the spinning violin solos and rich orchestral palette of Scheherazade’s nightly tales – a spirited heroine in an exotic world. And discover the charming panoramas of Saint-Saëns’ most evocative piano concerto, with its thudding steamship propellers and croaking frogs on the Nile.

KHACHATURIAN Spartacus: Suite
SAINT-SAËNS Piano Concerto No.5 (Egyptian)
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherazade

Alexander Lazarev conductor
Jean-Yves Thibaudet piano

Pre-concert talk by Yvonne Frindle in the Northern Foyer, 45 minutes before each performance.

LISTEN TO SAMPLES

Use < > buttons to scroll tracks - see below for listings.

Creativity makes us human. When Prometheus brought his clay statues to life it was the ancient power of harmony that turned them into thinking, feeling creatures. That might be a myth, but who hasn’t felt the civilising power of music?

With Beethoven’s Prometheus overture, the lyrical heart of Schumann’s concerto, and the impassioned Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, this is a concert of deep sentiment and heightened feelings – music to take you beyond the everyday.

Read more about Johannes Moser from The Sydney Morning Herald.

BEETHOVEN The Creatures of Prometheus: Overture
SCHUMANN Cello Concerto
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.6, Pathétique

Alexander Vedernikov conductor
Johannes Moser cello

AUDIO PLAYER LISTING

Track 1 – BEETHOVEN The Creatures of Prometheus: Overture
Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 445 112-2
Track 2 – SCHUMANN Cello Concerto: introduction
Lynn Harrell, cello, with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Neville Marriner
DECCA 442 8410
Track 3 – TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.6 (Pathétique): 1st movement (Adagio)
Track 4 – TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.6 (Pathétique): 3rd movement (Allegro molto vivace)
L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romand conducted by Ernest Ansermet
DECCA 480 0563

Audio kindly supplied by Universal Music.

Currently available from iTunes: Beethoven

LISTEN TO SAMPLES

Use < > buttons to scroll tracks - see below for listings.

Dance the farruca, malambo, fandango! Hear all the colours of Spain when Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the Peruvian-born conductor, returns to Sydney with this exhilarating program.

Joaquín Turina leads the dancing with music that rises “like incense” and seizes the listener with its elegant fervour. From Argentina, young composer Esteban Benzecry reveals the colours of the Southern Cross in a five-movement suite ending in a red-blooded malambo. Manuel de Falla brings the music that made him world-famous: The Three-Cornered Hat – a high-spirited ballet that radiates sensuousness and virility.

Rodrigo doesn’t dance. But his much-loved guitar concerto blends the ardent flamenco soul with a rococo elegance inspired by the palace of Aranjuez. This is the music that sealed Rodrigo’s fate as the composer of “that concerto”, and Slava Grigoryan makes his Sydney Symphony concert hall debut as its soloist.

TURINA Danzas fantásticas
RODRIGO Concierto de Aranjuez
BENZECRY Colours of the Southern Cross
FALLA The Three-Cornered Hat: Suites

Miguel Harth-Bedoya conductor
Slava Grigoryan guitar

Pre-concert talk by Natalie Shea in the Northern Foyer, 45 minutes before each performance.

AUDIO PLAYER LISTING

Track 1 – TURINA Danzas fantásticas: Orgia
West Australian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jorge Mester
ABC 438 198-2
Track 2 – RODRIGO Concierto de Aranjuez: 2nd movement (Adagio)
Slava Grigoryan, guitar, with the Queensland Orchestra conducted by Brett Kelly
ABC 476 8072
Track 3 – FALLA The Three-Cornered Hat: The Miller’s Dance
Track 4 – FALLA The Three-Cornered Hat: Final Dance (Jota)
West Australian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jorge Mester
ABC 438 198-2

Audio kindly supplied by Universal Music

Currently available from iTunes: Rodrigo

LISTEN TO SAMPLES

Use < > buttons to scroll tracks - see below for listings.

Here’s what you need to know…

Haydn: a witty composer with a deft touch for workplace politics; his Farewell Symphony cleverly ends up with just two musicians on the stage and won his orchestra the change of scene they were hankering after.

Bruch: a dreamer who heard the soul of music in melody; from its opening flourishes to its bravura gypsy finale, his much-loved First Violin Concerto sums up everything that is rich and enchanting about the Romantic style.

Schoenberg: rewrote the rulebook but believed only in inspiration; his symphony is “little but vast”, concentrated, forward-looking and daring.

Beethoven: ditto.

The greatest composers are always on the brink of something new and fresh. Hear it for yourself in a boldly imagined program that doesn’t stand still.

You can find out more about our guest violinist Daniel Hope via his website at www.danielhope.com.

MUSIC ON THE BRINK
HAYDN Symphony No.45 (Farewell)
BRUCH Violin Concerto No.1
SCHOENBERG Chamber Symphony No.1
BEETHOVEN Symphony No.8

Oleg Caetani conductor
Daniel Hope violin

PRE-CONCERT TALKS

Free pre-concert talk by Tony Cane in the Northern Foyer, 45 minutes before each concert.

AUDIO PLAYER LISTING

Track 1 – BRUCH Violin Concerto No.1: 1st movement (Introduction)
Arthur Grumiaux, violin, and the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Heinz Wallberg
PHILIPS 476 8485
Track 2 – SCHOENBERG Chamber Symphony No.1, Op.9: excerpt
Members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly
DECCA 473 728-2
Track 3 – BEETHOVEN Symphony No.8: 1st movement (Allegro vivace e con brio)
Track 4 – BEETHOVEN Symphony No.8: 4th movement (Allegro vivace)
Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 429 0402

Visit again in 2010 for more highlights from this concert.

Audio kindly supplied by Universal Music.

Currently available from iTunes:
Bruch
Schoenberg
Beethoven