A winter concert with a programme evoking the sunshine of Mediterranean landscapes. The works of Enrique Granados, Joaquín Rodrigo and Manuel de Falla offer a guide to the Iberian temperament, while Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella revises movements from the Italian Baroque period. The concert will predominantly feature Spanish music, and the guest conductor of the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra comes from the same country.
It is extremely rare to hear a guitar concerto during a traditional symphony orchestra concert. So it is safe to say that this performance of Concierto de Aranjuez, by the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–1999), who lost his sight at the age of three after contracting diphtheria but lived until the end of the 20th century, promises to be the most thrilling part of the evening for the audience, especially given that the work will be interpreted by the indisputably world class virtuoso Ana Vidović. The superb Croatian musician has won more than a dozen prizes in international competitions. We can expect the most authentic interpretations of the compositions from Granados, Rodrigo and de Falla, given that the concert’s guest conductor, Jordi Francés, is a Spanish musician, and an artist with an especially keen interest in the 20th- and 21st-century repertoire – this concert mostly consists of works from the 20th century (Granados’s Valses Poéticos predates it by five years). While the musical worlds of the Granados, Rodrigo and Falla works are strongly inspired by folklore, Pulcinella, in which Stravinsky revised musical works that were mainly attributed to the composer Pergolesi, is one of the composer’s first efforts in the direction of Neo-Classicism.
