Korngold & Prokofiev
Bethlehem Chapel, 4 April 2024 at 7.30 pm.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Much Ado About Nothing, suite
Sergei Prokofiev: Sinfonia Concertante
Christian Kluxen conductor
Andreas Brantelid violoncello
The Brno native Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a child prodigy. He grew up in Vienna, where, as a thirteen-year-old author, he already made his way to the Court Opera. A decade later he composed The Dead City, an opera with dramatically stimulating, provocatively inventive and brilliantly instrumented music that provides an interesting context for Puccini, Strauss, Wagner and Janáček and is his best-known work. Not long before Hitler annexed Austria, he and his family travelled to America, where he became a pioneer and later a classic of film music. He was commissioned to write music for Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing in 1918. He managed to compose a sparklingly colourful neoclassical score, which contains something of Mozart and Richard Strauss. Sergei Prokofiev, an original composer and great pianist, lived in the West after the Bolshevik Revolution, but eventually returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He was willing to make major concessions, but in 1948 he still became the target of an ideological attack that condemned him to a life of seclusion for the rest of his years. He died in 1953 on the same day as Stalin, under whose regime he, like Shostakovich and many other artists, suffered greatly. The Sinfonia Concertante, reworked from the original version of the not very well received Cello Concerto No. 2, is his last great work. In terms of the scope and gravity of the solo part, it is one of the most demanding works in the cello repertoire.
Ticket prices: CZK 590 | CZK 490 | CZK 390
The organiser reserves the right to changes in the list of scheduled performers.
