More Information

Orchestral Concert
Bactiguard Wire Brass
Conductor
Soloist
History
TICKETS
Home
Neston Music Festival 2010
The Orchestral Concert will take place at 7.30 on Saturday 4th September 2010 in
Neston Parish Church.
This will be followed by Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto with Simon Watterton. After a disastrous premiere of his First Symphony by a supposedly drunk Glazunov in 1897, Sergei Rachmaninov suffered a nervous breakdown. He was nursed back to health over a period of years by psychiatrist Nikolai Dahl. His second piano concerto confirmed his recovery and marked a period of sustained musical creativity in which he also composed two operas and his Second Symphony. The second and third movements were first performed with the composer as soloist on 2 December 1900. The complete work was unveiled, again with Rachmaninov as soloist, on 27 October 1901; the performance was conducted by his cousin, Alexander Siloti. It was a resounding success and remains one of Rachmaninoff's most enduringly popular works. The concerto was dedicated to Dr. Dahl.
The concert will open with the overture to Borodin's Prince Igor, an opera in four acts. The composer adapted the libretto from the East Slavic epic The Lay of Igor's Host, which recounts the campaign of Russian prince Igor Svyatoslavich against the invading Polovtsian tribes in 1185. The opera was left unfinished on the composer's death in 1887 and was edited and completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. It was first performed in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1890.

After the interval we will hear Sibelius' Second Symphony. The second is the most popular and probably most frequently performed of Sibelius' seven symphonies. It is more skilfully orchestrated than the first, the ideas of form are more mature and the violent Slavic gloom is replaced by a more classical touch. The heroic and optimistic first and final movements of the symphony were exactly what the Finnish public needed in 1902, during a period of Russian oppression. The first public performance consolidated Sibelius' fame as a national hero and the symphony was soon also triumphantly acclaimed abroad. There are many stories about the stages in which this popular work was composed. Sibelius is known to have improvised one of the themes for the finale during the christening of the son of the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela in 1899. He was also sketching a motif which ended up in the slow movement while he was in in February 1901. In his sketches he associated it with the encounter between Don Juan and Death. Another sketch is titled Christus; this theme end also ended up in the slow movement. It took another year to complete the work, by which time the initial programmatic concepts had receded. The triumphant first public performance, which according to Oscar Merikanto "exceeded even the highest expectations", took place on 8th March 1902.

.