Thoroughly romantic music
…will be performed at a concert by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and its principal conductor Ondrej Lenárd at the Rudolfinum on Monday 7 March. Jan Klika, a member of the orchestra’s cello group and its second concertmaster, will appear as a soloist.
From his youth, Gioachino Rossini churned out one opera after the other. His works didn’t always earn him admiration and praise by any means. Two titles have remained in the repertoire to this day, the ingenious and witty The Barber of Seville and the surprisingly serious William Tell, while only the overtures of several other operas of his are performed.
On this occasion we can look forward to the overture to the opera Tancredi, named after its hero, who frees a girl falsely accused of treason during the period when Christians were at war with the Saracens.
Concert will be broadcasted live on Czech Radio Vltava from 19:30 on Monday 7 March
Robert Schumann’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in A minor was composed during an intensely creative period when he had arrived in Düsseldorf as artistic director and was bursting with plans for the future. The composition of the cello concerto took a mere 14 days, which also attests to the fact he was fully absorbed creatively. A romantic, poetic piece exalting (at least according to the famous cellist Maisky) the composer’s wife Clara was born.
Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini is not intended to represent the specific story of ill-starred lovers from the fifth canto of the Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy – it is far more a description of the hell in which the murderous transgressors Francesca and Paolo found themselves, as well as the torments that tested them there and an echo of their sporadic moments of love. In any case it is masterful music that, thanks to its constant suspense, draws us in from the first note to the last.
The fourth great romantic piece is Leoš Janáček’s rhapsody Taras Bulba, a gripping reworking of the story by Nikolai Gogol. It is the drama of a Cossack Ataman who fought the Poles his entire life only to lose both his sons and meet his own end at the border. Though that may suggest a dark and depressing tone, Janáček composed music that is incredibly beautiful, majestic and stimulating.
