November 8, 2022 | Zaryadye Concert Hall
Soloist – Anna Tsybuleva, piano
Conductor – Arif Dadashev
Sibelius. “Finlandia”, tone poem, Op. 26
Grieg. Concerto for piano and orchestra in A minor, Op. 16
Nielsen. Symphony No. 5, Op. 50
The new concert of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia features symphonic gems of Fennoscandia composers – Finnish Jean Sibelius, Norwegian Edvard Grieg and Danish Carl Nielsen. The NPR will be directed by Arif Dadashev, a former member of the Orchestra's conductor-training group, at present a conductor at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater. The maestro is regularly collaborating with top Russian orchestras, has prepared several premiere productions at the Musa Cälil Tatar Opera and Ballet Theater, the Mazowiecki Teater Muzyczny in Warsaw and the Silesian Opera in Bytom (Poland).
The concert will start with Sibelius's symphonic poem “Finlandia” which reflects the protest of the composer and his compatriots against the attacks of the Russian autocracy on the democratic rights of Finns. Sibelius's contemporaries declared that “Finlandia” had brought more to the success of the struggle for freedom than many orations and pamphlets. The small symphonic score has an epic range, folk-song mood of themes (without particular citations) and brilliant orchestration.
It will be followed by Grieg's seminal Piano Concerto. After Chopin and Schumann, Grieg created the perfect example of a lyrical concerto, the masterpiece speaking the language of Norwegean folk music and breathing the nature of the composer's native country. The solo part will be played by Anna Tsybuleva, an alumna of the Moscow Conservatory and the Basel Academy of Music, winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition and holder of other esteemed awards, a Yamaha Artist.
The night will end with Nielsen's modernistic Fifth Symphony which continues the “peacekeeping” trend of the Fourth Symphony juxtaposing eternal human values and war madness, light and darkness, kindness and evil, creative force and chaos of destruction. According to one of his contemporaries, Nielsen 'put an end to the anemic inter-Scandinavian Romanticism and clapped on sails over the old Scandinavian schooner which had only nutated on the stale ripple'. Refusing the traditional Scandinavian melancholy, Nielsen prioritized movement, conflict and contrast, preferring discoveries by Bartók, Hindemith and Honegger to the Post-Romantic aesthetics. The Symphony was premiered under the baton of the composer on January 24, 1922, in Copenhagen.