Dayton Philharmonic - Rachmaninoff's Triumph
Dayton Philharmonic presents GUBAIDULINA Voices… Silence…, RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, and TCHAIKOVSKY 1812 Overture.
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Dayton Philharmonic - Rachmaninoff's Triumph
Dayton Philharmonic presents GUBAIDULINA Voices… Silence…, RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, and TCHAIKOVSKY 1812 Overture.
When Russian-Tatar composer Sofia Gubaidulina wrote Stimmen... Verstummen... (Voices… Silence…) in 1986, she composed it as a twelve-movement symphony, rather than one of four movements. The longest movement is slightly more than eleven minutes, but most are much shorter, several lasting less than one minute. If you close your eyes and listen carefully, the work can indeed sound to you as though it were a conversation between different instruments and orchestra sections. It is notable that the conversation is primarily genial and that it uses silence as an instrument section in its own right. For example, the actual climax to the work occurs in the ninth movement (and at the end of the twelfth), as the conductor conducts, but the orchestra doesn’t play. Voices… Silence… proves the point that unlike black and white, neither of which are actually colors, silence can have a sound.
Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Valentina Lisitsa began playing the piano at the age of three. She now resides in the United States and performs both at home and internationally. Fortunately for us, she shares a similar heritage with Sergei Rachmaninoff. The bottom line is that they both understand and share the characteristic Russian love for composing and performing beautiful, romantic music. The Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor endures as one of the world’s most beautiful and popular pieces, thanks in no small part to fabulous artists such as Ms. Lisitsa and dazzling new interpretations of the piece.
If you are one of the fairly large number of people who think that Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is about America’s defeat of the British army during its attempted invasion in the War of 1812, you are mistaken. It isn’t so. Just because in 1974 Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler started a tradition of jacking up ticket sales by staging cannons, steeple bells, and fireworks to enhance the overture at strategic points in the work as Tchaikovsky himself had done doesn’t mean the composition had anything to do with the good old USA. Tchaikovsky composed the piece to musically describe Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in 1812, using France’s La Marseillaise to depict the French army and Russia's God Save the Czar to depict the Russian forces in their execution of a scorched-earth policy to weaken and ultimately destroy their French enemy. This is a work designed, at its conclusion, to evoke a standing ovation regardless of the country in which it is played.
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