DANIEL HARDING / VILDE FRANG
For this concert, conductor Daniel Harding offers a superb farewell to Romanticism. Whether in Korngold’s Concerto (championed by the loyal Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang) or Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, the programme unfolds all the orchestral splendour of the early twentieth century. A concert that moves mountains.
Programme
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD (1897-1957)
Violin Concerto in D major Op. 35
Interval
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)
An Alpine Symphony Op. 64
Daniel Harding conducts Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27: III. Adagio (VFO)
Find out more
Admittedly, Korngold’s Violin Concerto was premiered in 1947, but the Austrian composer was deeply rooted in the Vienna of before the First World War. From his youth, this child prodigy dazzled the musical world with his precocity and his exceptionally Romantic idiom, which culminated in the opera Die tote Stadt. Fleeing Nazi persecution, Korngold settled in Hollywood where he became a remarkable film composer. Of teeming lyricism, his Violin Concerto brilliantly blends his cinematic experience with his Viennese youth.
Equally (post-)Romantic, Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony is the sprawling work of a 50-year-old composer returning for the last time to the genre of the tone poem. With massive orchestral forces, Strauss sets the sounds of the mountain to music, thereby joining a long Germanic tradition. In the ideal setting of the Salle des Combins, what a pleasure to hear music that depicts with exceptional evocative power the ascent of a mountain, from the opening night to the blazing day, like a hike from the climb to the summit to the descent home!
