PrintLondon Philharmonic Orchestra performs Karol Szymanowski's Symphony No.3 (The Song of the Night)
Violinist Joshua Bell and tenor Jeremy Ovenden perform with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
22 February 2012, 7.30pm
Royal Festival Hall
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX
Prices:
£39, £33, £27, £21, £16, £12, £9, Premium £65
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No.32
Johannes Brahms: Violin Concerto in D
Alexander Von Zemlinsky: Psalm 23 , Op.14
Karol Szymanowski: Symphony No.3 (The Song of the Night) for high voice, chorus & orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski, conductor
Joshua Bell, violin
Jeremy Ovenden, tenor
London Philharmonic Choir
With his Psalm 23, Alexander Zemlinsky made a heartfelt cry to God in his setting of the 23rd Psalm. The music moves from trepidation to despair to ecstasy, at once sensitive and majestic. In its glistening bid for the heavenly, it makes a perfect companion to Szymanowski's Third Symphony, The Song of the Night. From a vast nocturnal landscape, a human spirit ascends to join with the divine, soaring into the ether. Languorous sensuality radiates through this all-encompassing score, the final statement in a concert that follows two acknowledged masterworks by Mozart and Brahms with two exquisite twentieth-century rarities.
Szymanowski’s strongly chromatic Symphony, opus 27, which premiered in 1916, provides a tenor solo setting of poetry by the Sufi mystic Jalal'al-Din Rumi (1207-1273). Both Rumi's poems and Szymanowski's setting of them combine celebration of love and of the wonders of night. Its primary antecedent is Scriabin. Much of the choral part is wordless and Szymanowski's ecstasy in this piece, as in Scriabin's “Poem of Ecstasy,” has an organ in its climax along with piano, celesta and harps.
Additionally at 6.15pm in the Royal Festival Hall Dr Stephen Downes, Reader in Musicology at the University of Surrey discusses the music of Szymanowski and Zemlinsky (admission free).