Liszt – Ravel – Beethoven

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Franz Liszt: Dance Of Death For Piano And Orchestra 17 min.
Maurice Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand 19 min.
break 20 min.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 “Fate Symphony” 31 min.

Jonathan Darlington conductor
Marc-André Hamelin piano

Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra will perform two short but expressive concertante pieces for solo piano and Beethoven’s iconic Fate Symphony under the baton of Jonathan Darlington, British music director of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra and former chief conductor of the Duisburg Philharmonic and the Vancouver Opera in Canada. Franz Liszt, piano virtuoso and innovator in conducting and composition, bridged musical epochs. In Vienna he was taught not only by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny, but also by Beethoven’s teacher Antonio Salieri. He also studied privately with Antonín Rejcha in Paris. He has written thirteen symphonic poems, a new musical form he coined. Even his piano compositions were visionary, both in the field of piano technique and musical forms. They are extremely demanding to play, monumental in sound, but they subordinate virtuosity to content. Liszt was obsessed with religion, heaven and hell, and fascinated by death. His Totentanz, or Dance of Death, is a paraphrase of a Gregorian chant melody set to the text of the Dies irae, the Last Judgement; the modernist character of the piano part is clearly an innovative aspect. No less inventive is Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand and Orchestra, a work from the early 1930s. It was commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War. There is also an arrangement for piano for two hands, but Ravel did not approve of it and forbade its performance.

The concert is broadcast live by Czech Radio station Vltava.

Individual tickets: CZK 1,100 | CZK 900 | CZK 700 | CZK 500 | CZK 300 | CZK 180

Small subscription, 6 concerts: CZK 3,200 | CZK 2,800 | CZK 2,400 | CZK 2,000 | CZK 1,600

Large subscription, 12 concerts: CZK 4,500 | CZK 4,100 | CZK 3,700 | CZK 3,400 | CZK 2,100

The organiser reserves the right to change the list of scheduled performers.