Sibelius: Valse triste, Op. 44
Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47
Grieg: Peer Gynt – excerpts (Morning Mood; Anitra’s Dance; Arabian Dance; The Death of Åse; In the Hall of the Mountain King; Solveg’s Song)
Kristóf Baráti – violin
Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Matin Rajna
The title of this concert – ‘White Nights’ – refers to the lands of the north, where the sun never sets during part of the year, and for 24 hours of each day, there is no darkness. What does the ‘north’ mean in our collective consciousness? If we associate the south with a sort of temperamentality, the east with the exoticism of Asian countries, and the west with the development of technology and civilisation, then the north, we would have to say, is a place full of relentless cold and harshness. But when it comes to northern music, which is often also very passionate and energetic, isn’t the truth really the exact opposite of all this?
And speaking of cardinal directions, Kristóf Baráti, the soloist for the concert, might also make the audience of this northern concert think of the exciting lands of the south, as he lived in Venezuela between the ages of two and 12, the period when his musical consciousness was developing. Today the Kossuth Prize-winning violinist is celebrated all over the world, and his repertoire includes every important work written for the instrument. In his short career so far, the 26-year-old conductor Martin Rajna, a winner of the Junior Prima Award, has led the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester, the Győr Philharmonic and the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra, and this will not be his first time taking the podium as a guest with the Hungarian National Philharmonic. The concert will open with Jean Sibelius’s extraordinarily popular programme music Valse triste: it depict the tragic vision of a son who has fallen asleep while sitting vigil at his mother’s deathbed. It was Henrik Ibsen himself who commissioned his fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg to write the incidental music for his drama Peer Gynt in 1875, a task which the composer took on reluctantly. Nevertheless, the piece eventually became his most popular work. Sibelius’s 1904 violin concerto is a similarly popular work that has served for decades as one of the cornerstones of the literature written for the instrument. In Grieg’s work, the audience will get to enjoy the singing of soprano Ágnes Szalai.
