A Pact Set in Sand - Orchestre Métropolitain

Pre-concert Experience

Works

Holst

1874 – 1934

Winter Idyll

Nationalism has often permeated works of Western classical music, and nationalistic cultural aspirations were a strong feature of 19th-century Europe in particular. Countries sought to elevate their distinctive cultures and free themselves from the shackles of relatively uniform styles that had dominated until then.

Composers’ careers were influenced in different ways: some deliberately embedded nationalism in their works while others were identified as nationalistic through audience and critical reception. For many, sociopolitical conflicts in their homeland led to agonizing choices. Should they affirm their nationalist sentiments? Conceal them? Or pretend to espouse them?

English composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934) was a proud representative of his national culture. He was interested in the folk melodies of his country, integrated them into his compositions and was widely recognized as a nationalist composer. His suite The Planets (1918) brought him fame, and he is known today for his abundant output for symphony and wind orchestras. Born into a family of artists but unable to play the piano because of neuritis in his right hand, he learned to play the trombone at an early age, which perhaps explains the strong presence of brass instruments in his compositions.

To mitigate the challenges of perfecting his instrumental technique, Holst began composing in his teens. In 1893, he was admitted to the Royal College of Music in London, where he met Ralph Vaughan Williams, who became a close friend and of course a famous composer who played a fundamental role in the revival of English folk music. During his student years, Holst was particularly fascinated by Wagner’s narrative writing and operatic treatment of Norse mythology. This Wagnerian influence can be perceived in A Winter Idyll (1897), one of Holst’s early works, cast as a type of symphonic poem. Although no descriptive text accompanies it, its title suggests an imaginary landscape where love could blossom in a pastoral setting.

A Winter Idyll opens with a motif of three unison eighth notes reminiscent of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (immediately recognizable in the famous pa-pa-pa-pam), followed by an ebullient melody at the oboe which expands to the full orchestra. The ceremonious rhythmic underpinning of the brass is almost choreographic, while the violins’ rapid sixteenth-note descents conjure the image of unrelenting wind stirring up a winter blizzard. In the middle of the piece, a key change from major to minor and the striking of cymbals suggest a break in the narrative, but the return of the joyful theme from the beginning brightens the landscape once again. A Winter Idyll is nostalgic inasmuch as its orchestration seeks to combine Wagner, Mendelssohn and Beethoven, heralding Holst’s musical success in combining Romantic style, folk melodies and the collective imagination, all characteristic of his output.

Khachaturian

1903 – 1978

Violin Concerto

In his role as a Soviet composer in the former USSR, Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) was compelled to embody a nationalist ideal of righteousness and appreciation of the people.

Working with music under the Soviet regime was a dangerous affair and many composers—among them Shostakovich—found themselves in dire straits. In the regime’s tightly controlled media and cultural world, composers walked on eggshells to ensure the safety of their families and close contacts, often risking the integrity of their musical creativity.

Khachaturian, nevertheless, succeeded in incorporating the melodies of his native Armenia into his music. Divided for centuries between Russian and Ottoman domination, this region of the Caucasus was annexed as a Soviet republic in 1920. Until his eighteenth year, the composer was immersed in the exuberant melodies of Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani music, the colours of which he would later revisit. In 1922, he left his native Armenia to study piano in Moscow, where he also took composition classes.

In the 1930s, Khachaturian’s career quickly ascended. Prokofiev, who was already world-renowned, showered him with praise for his Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano. His Piano Concerto was dedicated to the famous pianist Lev Oborin… But it was his Violin Concerto, dedicated to David Oistrakh, that consolidated his international reputation in 1940 and brought him to the attention of leaders in the USSR, who awarded him the Stalin Prize.

“There is too much ugliness and despair in the world for us to let it invade our art.”

– Aram Khachaturian

Khachaturian possessed a generous temperament in addition to great gifts as an orchestrator and conductor. He succeeded in establishing himself as one of the official composers of the Soviet Union, a privileged position under the regime. Despite the political pressure inherent in such a role, he was always able to highlight the culture of his people in his music. He himself described this music as “beautiful in itself, neither great nor small, but simply beautiful, open, fulfilled, happy to be alive”.

The Violin Concerto is, in fact, a work of unbridled energy: the extreme virtuosity of the solo violin part, the modal melodies played fortissimo by the orchestra and the dancing rhythms supported by off-beats capture the audience’s attention at every turn. The first movement takes its inspiration from a piece entitled “Tea for Two” (1924) by Broadway composer Vincent Youmans. The song, covered by Doris Day in the 1950 film of the same name, was well known in the USSR, having been translated and incorporated into an operetta by Boris Fomin in 1926. The second movement is inspired by Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (1939). Over a melancholy waltz rhythm, the violin dominates with great expressiveness and a quality of overwhelming sentimentality. The movement concludes with an ascending scale motif played by the whole orchestra before transitioning to the wild dance which forms the third movement.

Zemlinsky

1871 – 1942

The Mermaid (Die Seejungfrau)

Alexander Von Zemlinsky (1871–1942) suffered through nationalism rather than profiting by it. Born in Austria to a Jewish family, he left Europe to flee the Nazi regime in 1938. He died unknown in the United States, where he was never able to pursue his career.

Notwithstanding these circumstances, Zemlinsky had achieved some notoriety in Europe. While towering figures like Schoenberg and Mahler were highly influential, Zemlinsky served as a conductor in several major opera houses, taught in several institutions, and left behind an extensive catalogue of works.

One of his best-known pieces is the tone poem Die Seejungfrau, lost for several decades after his death. Following its premiere in Vienna in 1905, Zemlinsky withdrew the score from the public domain to make revisions. He offered the first movement as a gift to his friend Marie Pappenheim, taking the second and third movements with him in exile to the United States. After his death, his widow mistook the two movements for fragments of symphonies and donated the score to the Library of Congress in Washington along with the composer’s other manuscripts. Only in the 1980s, when two doctoral students undertook to compare these two movements with the first one that had remained in Vienna, was it deduced that all three made up a single work.

Based on a tale by Hans Christian Andersen—which culminates in a far grimmer ending than the well-known Disney movie—Die Seejungfrau was a work of particularly personal significance to Zemlinsky. It epitomized his broken heart. Like the Little Mermaid who, after trading her voice for human legs to the Sea Witch, was forsaken by the Prince, who married another, Zemlinsky had been rejected by Alma Schindler in favour of Gustav Mahler.

Rather than deploying a linear narrative recounting the story of the Little Mermaid, Zemlinsky presents a series of colourful tableaux recalling the settings in which the story unfolds. The first movement depicts the ocean floor, with low notes from the brass that seem to rise from the depths of the sea, and undulations in the woodwinds that summon the billowing of fish and algae. The second movement brings us to the scene of the Prince’s shipwrecked boat, when the Little Mermaid falls in love. We hear the headlong rush of the horns, then a long awakening to feelings of romantic love and their attendant joy, brought to life in the high register of the flutes and piccolo. The third movement represents the barter between the Sea Witch and the Little Mermaid, followed by her visit to the Prince’s palace. Its atmosphere of alarm and despair is rendered in a funeral march accompanied by the violins’ desperate bow strokes. As the Little Mermaid rises to the heavens to find peace, the sounds of the sea return in a resounding finale.

The fairy tale vs. the Disney version

Many will be familiar with Ariel, the red-haired mermaid who dreams of having legs so she can run, dance … and beguile her prince charming. Swindled by Ursula the sea witch, who poses as Ariel and almost succeeds in marrying her beloved, in the end, the Little Mermaid defeats her rival and weds the Prince.

In the original tale, it is not love that entices the heroine. It is her longing for an eternal soul, as humans have, that moves her to exchange her mermaid tail for a pair of legs. However, to truly change her condition, she will have to win a man’s love. Enter the Prince.

Neither is it because he falls prey to a witch’s ploy that the Prince strays from the Little Mermaid. In Andersen’s tale, he genuinely falls in love with another. The Mermaid, who is now fated to turn into sea foam, refuses to act out the plan devised by her sisters: to kill the Prince before he marries his betrothed. The mercy she shows enables her to escape her fate and become a daughter of the air. Perhaps a less glamorous finale to the story and indeed, a far cry from the Disney version.

Conductor & Soloists

JoAnn Falletta

Conductor

Multiple Grammy Award-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Connie and Marc Jacobson Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center and Conductor Laureate of the Hawaii Symphony. She was recently named one of the “Fifty Great Conductors,” past and present, by Gramophone Magazine, and is hailed for her work as a conductor, recording artist, audience builder and champion of American composers.  

As Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Falletta became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra and has been credited with bringing the Philharmonic to an unprecedented level of national and international prominence. The Buffalo Philharmonic has become one of the leading recording orchestras for Naxos, with two Grammy Award-winning recordings. 

Internationally, Falletta has conducted many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, and South America, including recent and upcoming concerts in Spain, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, and Croatia. Her recent and upcoming North American guest conducting includes the National Symphony, the orchestras of Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, Nashville, Indianapolis, Houston, Toronto, Milwaukee, Vancouver, Quebec, and a concert at Alice Tully Hall with her alma mater, The Juilliard School Orchestra. In 2022, she led the National Symphony in two PBS televised specials for New Year’s Eve and the 50th Anniversary of the Kennedy Center and made her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut at the Tanglewood Music Festival.
 
With a discography of over 125 titles, Falletta is a leading recording artist for Naxos. She has won two individual Grammy Awards, including the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance as conductor of the world premiere Naxos recording, Richard Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua. In 2019, she won her first individual Grammy Award as conductor of the London Symphony in the Best Classical Compendium category for Spiritualist, her fifth world premiere recording of the music of Kenneth Fuchs. Her Naxos recording of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan received two Grammys in 2008. Her 2020 Naxos recording of orchestral music of Florent Schmitt with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra received the prestigious Diapason d’Or Award. Her 2023-24 releases for Naxos include a new recording of orchestral works of Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály– Hary Janos, Symphony and Summer Evening with the Buffalo Philharmonic and a recording of concertos by Copland, Creston, Kay and Piston with the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic and soloists Anna Mattix (oboe) and Tim McAllister (saxophone). Last season, Naxos released two highly praised albums with Falletta and the BPO, Alexander Scriabin: Poem of Ecstasy and Symphony #2, and a recording of two concertos by award-winning American composers, Danny Elfman’s violin concerto Eleven Eleven performed by Sandy Cameron and Adolphus Hailstork’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist Stewart Goodyear.
 

Falletta is a member of the esteemed American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has served by presidential appointment as a Member of the National Council on the Arts during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and is the recipient of many of the most prestigious conducting awards. She has conducted over 1,600 orchestral works by 600-plus composers, including over 125 works by women. Credited with performing more than 150 world premieres, ASCAP has honored her as “a leading force for music of our time”. In 2019, JoAnn was named Performance Today’s first Classical Woman of The Year, calling her a “tireless champion,” and lauding her “unique combination of artistic authority and compassion, compelling musicianship and humanity.”
 
Falletta is a strong advocate and mentor for young professional and student musicians. She has led seminars for women conductors for the League of American Orchestras and established a unique collaboration between the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Mannes College of Music to give up-and-coming conductors professional experience with a leading American orchestra. In 2018, she served on the jury of the Malko Competition in Denmark. She has had great success working with young musicians, guest conducting orchestras at top conservatories and summer programs such as Tanglewood, the National Repertory Orchestra, National Orchestral Institute, Interlochen, and Brevard Music Center, and as Artistic Advisor at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
 
Falletta has held the positions of Principal Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Phoenix Symphony, Music Director of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Associate Conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and Music Director of the Denver Chamber Orchestra and The Women’s Philharmonic.
 
After earning her bachelor’s degree at Mannes, Falletta received master’s and doctoral degrees from The Juilliard School. When not on the podium, JoAnn enjoys playing classical guitar, writing, cycling, yoga and is an avid reader.

Nemanja Radulović

Violin

Serbian-French violinist Nemanja Radulović champions the power of music to bring people together with his unique energy and candour, thrilling virtuosity, depth of expression, and adventurous programming. His hotly anticipated BBC Proms debut in 2019 with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Kirill Karabits featured a Barber Violin Concerto played with ‘lyric delicacy and…super-virtuosity’ (The Times).

Signed exclusively to Warner Classics in 2021, Mr Radulović’s debut album on the label – ROOTS – represents a beguiling sonic journey evoked by his many influences and inspirations to date. His previous album, Baïka, one of a string of nine successful recordings made on the Deutsche Grammophon and the Universal Music Group labels, was declared ‘a fiery whirlwind of an album…’ by BBC Music Magazine, which awarded it 5 stars and the coveted Critics’ Choice Award. Gramophone Magazine praised Baïka’s ‘imaginative pairings’, saying that ‘…Radulović dispatches [the Khachaturian Violin Concerto] with energy and firepower…’ and that ‘…with Radulović as narrator, this is an album with entrancing tales to tell.’ His latest Warner Classics album, releasing in November 2023, features Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Radulović’s own arrangement of Beethoven’s famed ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata. Winner of the 2015 Echo Klassik Award for Newcomer of the Year, Mr Radulović’s recent and forthcoming highlights include debut engagements with the New York Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the Hallé

Orchestra, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec; an extensive UK tour with the Gävle Symphony Orchestra and Jaime Martín; sold-out performances with his ensemble Double Sens at diverse venues such as the 1000-seat Tašmajdan Stadium in Belgrade, the Folle Journée de Nantes and Chorégies d’Orange festivals, and at the Paris Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Berlin Philharmonie, and Vienna Konzerthaus.

Mr Radulović has amassed a legion of loyal fans around the world who have enjoyed his performances with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Munich Philharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie- Orchester Berlin, Staatskapelle Dresden, Gothenburg Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony in Tokyo, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Orquesta Nacional de España, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, NDR Radiophilharmonie in Hanover, WDR Sinfonieorchester in Cologne, Dusseldorf Symphony, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Belgian National Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI in Turin, Orchestra della Toscana, Tampere Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, National Symphony in Dublin, Copenhagen Phil, Geneva Camerata, Queensland Symphony, Macao Orchestra, and the Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonikoa.

Mr Radulović has an equal passion for the intimacy of chamber music and is an increasingly active recitalist on the international circuit. He has performed at such notable venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Berlin Philharmonie, both the Salle Pleyel and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the Athens Megaron, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and the Melbourne Recital Centre in Australia. His many recital partners include Marielle Nordmann, Laure Favre-Kahn, and Susan Manoff.

An artist who seeks to broaden the boundaries of classical music, Mr Radulović also regularly undertakes a play/direct role with his chamber orchestra, Double Sens, which was recently celebrated for their unprecedented musical film entitled Unique – an artist, a place, a concert, which featured selections by Bach and from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, as well as a new arrangement by frequent collaborator Aleksandar Sedlar of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, all shot and recorded live at the Neolithic site in Carnac, France. Their other recent recordings include Paganini Fantasy (2013), Journey East (2014), BACH (2016), Tchaikovsky (2017), and Baïka (2018).

Mr Radulović’s recognition for his work in classical music includes International Revelation of the Year by the Victoires de la musique classique in 2005, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Arts in Niš, Serbia, and an ELLE Style Award for Musician of the Year in 2015. In 2017, he was appointed ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’. He was the winner of several international violin competitions, such as Joseph Joachim in Hanover, George Enescu in Bucharest, and Stradivarius in Cremona.

Born in Serbia in 1985, Nemanja Radulović studied at the Faculty of Arts and Music in Belgrade, the Saarlandes Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Saarbrücken, the Stauffer Academy in Cremona with Salvatore Accardo, and the Conservatoire de Paris with Patrice Fontanarosa.

Kseniya Simonova

Sand artist (The Mermaid)

Kseniya Simonova is a sand artist, winner of «Ukraine’s got talent», announced as Internet-sensation by «The Guardian».

She creates beautiful and touching stories with just sand and her hands. She is the most viewed sand artist on Internet. After triumphal win on the show, Kseniya has performed her sand animation shows all over the word in more than 70 countries. She was invited to show her art before Royalty and Presidents, among them are the Royal Family of Thailand, Queen of Denmark, Princess of Denmark, Royal Family of Morocco, Royal Family of Bhutan, members of Royal Family of Great Britain, Royal Family of Bahrain, and also Presidents of Malta, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey and many others. The most respected stages of the world accepted her art — from Special Olympic Games closing ceremony in Athens to YouTube Symphony orchestra Gala in Sydney Opera house.

Her beautiful sand animation became a staging act for Ukraine on Eurovision Song Contest, helping Ukrainian singer Mika Newton in getting 4th place in the Grand Final.

In 2019 she returned to Eurovision with Moldova’s singer Anna Odobescu as a staging director also performing a brand new genre called snow animation for the song «Stay».

In early 2019 Simonova took part in «America’s Got Talent: the Champions» season 1 on NBC. At semi-final she received a standing ovation from the judges and the audience. As soon as the performance was over, she got the golden buzzer from host Terry Crews which sent her straight through into the finals of the competition. Her Golden Buzzer performance got 150 million views. Simonova’s performance in the finals, «Love Always Wins,» was highly esteemed by the judges. Simon Cowell called it «one of the most beautiful acts in the history of Got Talent». At the end of the show, she finished in third place.

Later in 2019 Simonova took part in «Britain’s Got Talent» on ITV. In the first episode Simonova received a Golden Buzzer from one of the judges Amanda Holden and got into finals. She finished in third place at the finals.

Her act is the only act who received two Golden Buzzers on two different «The Champions» series of the Got Talent franchise.

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