Thursday Afternoon Symphony

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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

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 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

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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