Tour: La Chaise-Dieu

Grandiose romanticism performed by one of the best orchestras in the world. Rachmaninoff and Mahler on the program of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. A song that is most expressive without words. A virtuoso piano concerto that is probably more “comfortable” than the previous one, only according to its composer. A symphony that took the genre to a whole new level. Each one is a beautiful, emotionally resonant piece. The orchestral version of Vocalise, a gem of the vocal repertoire, originally written for voice and piano, will open the concert, followed by Piano Concerto No. 3, with Isata Kanneh-Mason, who has performed at major concert halls in the world, from the Royal Albert Hall to Carnegie Hall, as a soloist, and recorded a number of exciting albums as a Decca Classics artist. After the interval, the orchestra will perform Mahler’s lengthy palette of emotions, his Symphony No. 1, which was premiered in Budapest.

"Why do you need words when you can express everything better and more articulately with your voice and your interpretation than anyone could with words?”, Rachmaninoff wrote to singer Antonina Nezhdanova, to whom he dedicated the last of the Op. 34 14 songs. The vocal part of Vocalise must be performed using a chosen vowel. The sustained notes and supple melodies create an almost violin-like sound. It's no wonder that many instrumental versions of the popular song have been written, with the orchestral version being created by the composer himself. This orchestration perhaps enhances the sensuality and hypnotic beauty of the piece.

Rachmaninoff, who was touring as both a pianist and as a conductor, increasingly wanted to devote himself entirely to composing. However, he couldn’t say no to an American commission in 1909, for which he also composed a brand new piano concerto. Soon after its premiere, he performed it with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Gustav Mahler, as well. The first movement of the piece, also known as “Rach 3”, begins in an unusually simple manner, with a calm Russian theme, and then soaring melodies lead to the cadenza offering two versions to the soloist. The series of variations of the middle movement, traversing from melancholy to ecstasy, is broken up by a feather-light waltz before the music flows into a bright and grandiose finale intriguingly combining the material of the earlier themes.

After Beethoven, writing symphonies could no more be a simple routine. Composers were less inclined to turn to the genre and when they did, the result was numerous sketches, several versions and continuous struggle as manifested in their letters. And the results were also masterpieces, of course. Mahler started to work on his first symphony at the end of 1887. At first, he planned it to be a five-movement symphonic poem with a program. "A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything”, he wrote to Sibelius. This attitude is reflected in the motifs reaching across the movements and related to one another, the self-references, the stylistic diversions and also the varied instrumentation. The symphony starts with a rather long and slow introduction. Then we gradually arrive from the motif fragments at the main motif of the composition. The deleted “Blumine”, now performed as an independent concert piece, was replaced with an energetic scherzo in the second movement, which is followed by a unique slow movement including a children’s song performed by double bass, klezmer music and a soldier’s march. The piece concludes with a passionate finale, tragic at first, but eventually bringing triumph.