December 23, 2022 | Zaryadye Hall
Academic Grand Choir “Masters of Choral Singing”
Conductor – Arsenty Tkachenko
Nielsen. Helios Overture, Op. 17
Holst. «The Planets», suite for orchestra, Op. 32
Arsenty Tkachenko and the NPR will present at the Zaryadye Hall a new interactive program featuring cosmogonic images in music. The night will start with the “Helios” Overture by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen. A sojourn in Athens in the spring of 1903 inspired him to conceive a musical work depicting the sunrise and the sunset at the Aegean Sea. The score dedicated to composer Julius Röntgen has the epigraph “Silence and darkness. The sun rises with a joyous song of praise. It wanders its golden way and sinks quietly into the sea.”
It will be followed by the monumental symphonic suite “The Planets” by the English composer Gustav Holst, a work that made the author world-famous. The Suite was triggered by astrological ideas: each movement is allotted to one of the planets of the Solar System and the music transpires its astrological connotation. The Suite has influenced greatly many composers (Hollywoodian especially), mainly by its orchestration. The Suite written during the First World War was not directly connected with the tragic events in Europe, but the contrast between the images of war and peace is evident in it.
The performance of the Suite will be shared with the Academic Grand Choir “Masters of Choral Singing” (whose artistic director is Lev Kontorovich). It will also be illustrated by video projections made in the aesthetics of Medieval engravings with live figures reproducing the character of each planet (video artist – Alexandra Komarova, director – Ekaterina Vasileva).