Wagner: Ouvertures

The symphonic evening with the musicAeterna Orchestra is dedicated to Italy depicted in Tchaikovsky's compositions. The most cosmopolitan of the Russian composers of the 19th century, Tchaikovsky travelled extensively throughout his life in Europe, by 1880 having managed to visit the Italian Peninsula three times. The very nature of his talent is more "Italian" than "German": Tchaikovsky appreciates open-hearted emotions and expressiveness of melody, saturates abstract symphonic genres with theatrical drama, and values success with the public higher than the approval of critics. The concert programme encompasses three of his opuses related to Italy musically or in terms of the plot.

The symphonic fantasy "Francesca da Rimini" coexists in Tchaikovsky's creative biography with "Swan Lake" and "Eugene Onegin" - all three compositions are united by the theme of the doomed love. The composer came about with the conception of "Francesca" on his way to Bayreuth for the premiere of "The Ring of the Nibelung"; Tchaikovsky later agreed with critics about Wagner's influence on his score. In the story of Paolo and Francesca, the composer is interested in its dramatic potential in the first place. Tchaikovsky is not prone to abstract searches for sound colour, he is emotionally involved in the chosen plot, emphasizing in it the acuteness of the conflict and the depth of feelings of the characters. Saint-Saens placed "Francesca" musically above Liszt's "Dante Symphony", and cellist Karl Davydov, to whom the author would later dedicate his "Capriccio Italien", called the fantasy "the greatest work of our time."

In December 1879, Tchaikovsky found himself in Rome during the carnival and, impressed by what he saw, decided to compose "something of the kind of Glinka's Spanish fantasies." A few months later, the score of the "Capriccio Italien" was ready. It indeed succeeds to Glinka's Spanish diptych in many ways – from the details of form and orchestration to the general treatment of the "national" in the vein of entertaining exoticism. Tchaikovsky in "Capriccio" looks at the Mediterranean with a tourist gaze: this is a paradise land where there are no sorrows, struggles and dramas, and sounds radiate joy, light, and serenity. "There is hardly any other composition in Russian classical music which contains not a single atom of gloom," as one of the reviewers summed up after the premiere.

The fantasy overture "Romeo and Juliet" is the only major symphonic composition by Tchaikovsky that does not have an opus number. Tchaikovsky could consider the overture not entirely his composition - since Balakirev's role in its creation, in fact, is teetering on the verge of co-authorship. It was Balakirev (to whom the overture is dedicated) who offered Tchaikovsky the plot, the tonal plan, the main images and even specific pictorial solutions ("fierce Allegro with saber strokes"), and his criticism forced Tchaikovsky to compose whole sections of the form anew, from the entrée to the outro. In "Romeo and Juliet" Tchaikovsky for the first time found his personal formula of symphonic drama: fatal images of doom, sharp contrasts, emotional waves, lyrics isolated and detached from the surrounding storms, tragic denouement of conflict, and ambiguous triumph. And also for the first time in his life he ascended to the top of melodic expressiveness - in the famous theme of love, which Rimsky-Korsakov later recognized as "one of the best themes of all Russian music."

The symphonic evening with the musicAeterna Orchestra is dedicated to Italy depicted in Tchaikovsky's compositions. The most cosmopolitan of the Russian composers of the 19th century, Tchaikovsky travelled extensively throughout his life in Europe, by 1880 having managed to visit the Italian Peninsula three times. The very nature of his talent is more "Italian" than "German": Tchaikovsky appreciates open-hearted emotions and expressiveness of melody, saturates abstract symphonic genres with theatrical drama, and values success with the public higher than the approval of critics. The concert programme encompasses three of his opuses related to Italy musically or in terms of the plot.
 
The symphonic fantasy "Francesca da Rimini" coexists in Tchaikovsky's creative biography with "Swan Lake" and "Eugene Onegin" - all three compositions are united by the theme of the doomed love. The composer came about with the conception of "Francesca" on his way to Bayreuth for the premiere of "The Ring of the Nibelung"; Tchaikovsky later agreed with critics about Wagner's influence on his score. In the story of Paolo and Francesca, the composer is interested in its dramatic potential in the first place. Tchaikovsky is not prone to abstract searches for sound colour, he is emotionally involved in the chosen plot, emphasizing in it the acuteness of the conflict and the depth of feelings of the characters. Saint-Saens placed "Francesca" musically above Liszt's "Dante Symphony", and cellist Karl Davydov, to whom the author would later dedicate his "Capriccio Italien", called the fantasy "the greatest work of our time." 

In December 1879, Tchaikovsky found himself in Rome during the carnival and, impressed by what he saw, decided to compose "something of the kind of Glinka's Spanish fantasies." A few months later, the score of the "Capriccio Italien" was ready. It indeed succeeds to Glinka's Spanish diptych in many ways – from the details of form and orchestration to the general treatment of the "national" in the vein of entertaining exoticism. Tchaikovsky in "Capriccio" looks at the Mediterranean with a tourist gaze: this is a paradise land where there are no sorrows, struggles and dramas, and sounds radiate joy, light, and serenity. "There is hardly any other composition in Russian classical music which contains not a single atom of gloom," as one of the reviewers summed up after the premiere.
 
The fantasy overture "Romeo and Juliet" is the only major symphonic composition by Tchaikovsky that does not have an opus number. Tchaikovsky could consider the overture not entirely his composition - since Balakirev's role in its creation, in fact, is teetering on the verge of co-authorship. It was Balakirev (to whom the overture is dedicated) who offered Tchaikovsky the plot, the tonal plan, the main images and even specific pictorial solutions ("fierce Allegro with saber strokes"), and his criticism forced Tchaikovsky to compose whole sections of the form anew, from the entrée to the outro. In "Romeo and Juliet" Tchaikovsky for the first time found his personal formula of symphonic drama: fatal images of doom, sharp contrasts, emotional waves, lyrics isolated and detached from the surrounding storms, tragic denouement of conflict, and ambiguous triumph. And also for the first time in his life he ascended to the top of melodic expressiveness - in the famous theme of love, which Rimsky-Korsakov later recognized as "one of the best themes of all Russian music."

Nocturnal enigma concerts at the Perm Art Gallery are one of the Diaghilev Festival traditions that define its atmosphere. Under the gallery dome amidst Permian gods — the unique wooden sculptures — music sounds: what kind of music it is becomes known only after the programme has been performed. In the meantime, the twilight in the hall gradually gives way to light, and immediately after the concert the audience can come out on the Kama River bank to meet the dawn.

The "Baroque Gala" does not attempt to cover the entire century and a half era in one evening. The concert programme offers us just one, but an extremely important perspective: an insight into the Italian branch of the High Baroque and its two main achievements — opera seria and instrumental concert style.
Opera, or melodramma seria, was a moralistic, sublime, and cruel art. In its plots there acted rulers, gods, and heroes, love conflicted with honour and duty, and virtue was always rewarded. In the first half of the 18th century, such operas were staged all over Europe, from London to Lisbon and St. Petersburg — almost exclusively for the entertainment of a narrow circle of the highest nobility. Monarchs competed with each other in the wealth and luxury of their court theatrical productions. Star performers — singers, castrati and prima donnas, earned as much as the Hollywood actors, and commoners, whose taxes, labour, and sometimes blood paid for all this splendour, happened to beat famous artists when they met them in the streets.

Virtuosos encouraged composers to write music that was increasingly sophisticated technically; in some arias, vocal coloratura would not fall short of the frantic sound cascades of violin parts in complexity. The singers also were required to be able to improvise. Changing the melody when repeating it, showing off in cadences — all this was and still is a model of vocal prowess and one of the main subjects for the listener of baroque music. The soloist in the opera was obliged to show a wide range of emotions, for which the composer provided him with a proper number of arias in various moods — fury, heroic pathos, love lyrics, sorrow, and exhilaration. As a result, three-part arias da capo (almost all the numbers in the concert are of this type) turned out to be the most important vocal form of the time; composers of Handel's or Scarlatti's level composed more than a thousand such arias each in the course of their career.

A German who spent most of his life in England, Handel was at the same time one of the major representatives of the Italian style, and his works naturally occupy the central place in the evening's programme. Arias from his operas were written during the triumphant London period, when a superstar trio — castrato Senesino, Francesca Cuzzoni, and Faustina Bordoni sang in the performances of the Royal Academy of Music headed by Handel. These give way to arias from English-language oratorios written later, when Italian opera in England went out of fashion and was cast into oblivion for a couple of centuries. Its style and methods, however, continued to live in a new guise — in the aria of Deyanira from the oratorio "Hercules", Handel transforms the da capo form into a dramatic scene and anticipates the scenes of madness from the bel canto operas of the 19th century.

Besides arias, the only purely instrumental compositions in the programme also belong to Antonio Vivaldi. Among them there is a concert from the collection "L'estro armonico" — perhaps the most influential collection of instrumental music in the 18th century. And next to them there are the arias of the composers of "the second rate", whose music, in fact, is no weaker than the music of recognized stars: its harmonic experiments are no less bold, the vocal parts are no less puzzling, and the orchestra sounds with the same lyrical or wrathful force. Italian music is direct and sensual; it resists distanced listening and irresistibly draws us into its emotional orbit. Perhaps this is where the secret of its popularity is hidden, the popularity that is not ceasing even now, 300 years later.