BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
Saturday, June 29, 2024 at 8:00 p.m.
CBC Glenn Gould Studio
250 John St. West, Toronto ON M5T 1X5
Markham Contemporary Music Festival presents the Canadian début of the General Director of the Bucharest National Opera Daniel Jinga. Daniel Wnukowski performs César Franck’s Symphonic Variations, a late-Romantic cyclic work in three parts in which the main theme grows and transforms into the thematic material of subsequent movements. Vincent D’Indy’s Symphonie sur un Chant Montagnard Français (Symphony on a French Mountain Air) begins with a pentatonic folk tune—which d’Indy heard in a French village overlooking the Cévennes—that then becomes the thematic basis for the subsequent movements. Closing the program is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C; one of the composers earliest symphonic works, Symphony in C was composed at the Paris Conservatory when Bizet was only seventeen. The symphony shares similarities to the work of Bizet’s teacher, Charles Gounod, but has been hailed as a masterpiece of the Romantic repertoire.
Daniel Jinga | conductor, Daniel Vnukowski | pianist, Jürgen Petrenko | host
7:10 p.m. Prélude: pre-concert recital.
7:20 p.m. Pre-concert talk.
Intermission discussion and Q&A with Daniel Jinga and Daniel Vnukowski.
Co-presented with the Kindred Spirits Orchestra.
Daniel Vnukowski performs César Franck’s Symphonic Variations, a late-Romantic cyclic work in three parts in which the main theme grows and transforms into the thematic material of subsequent movements. Vincent D’Indy’s Symphonie sur un Chant Montagnard Français (Symphony on a French Mountain Air) begins with a pentatonic folk tune—which d’Indy heard in a French village overlooking the Cévennes—that then becomes the thematic basis for the subsequent movements. Closing the program is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C: a youthful work composed at the Paris Conservatory when Bizet was only seventeen, Symphony in C shares similarities to the work of Bizet’s teacher, Charles Gounod, but has been hailed as a masterpiece of the Romantic repertoire.
Markham Contemporary Music Festival presents the music of Stravinsky and Hindemith. Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments uses rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic devices reminiscent of The Rite of Spring, but is orchestrated for only wind instruments, and uses the plural form—Symphonies—not to denote the piece’s formal construction, but rather to invoke the broader term meaning ‘to sound together.’ Henry From then brings to life the same composer’s Concerto for Piano and Winds—a neo-Romantic work with unusual performing forces, since concerti were typically for a solo instrument and orchestra. In Paul Hindemith’s Konzertmusik the piano, harps, and winds appear to be odds with one another, with the former playing in a highly chromatic, atonal idiom, and the latter in a more melodic vein.
Manuel de Falla’s The Three-cornered Hat suite draws its music from de Falla’s ballet of the same name, which uses harmonic and melodic idioms derived from traditional Andalusian folk music, flamenco style, and the cante jondo, and had sets designed Pablo Picasso. One of the greatest contemporary interpreters of Chopin, internationally renowned pianist Ludmil Angelov then performs Frédéric Chopin’s virtuosic Piano Concerto No. 2. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 can be heard as a per aspera ad astra narrative: through hardship to the stars. It’s cyclical structure, in which the same motif recurs in all three movements, begins in E minor, and gradually makes its way through a large-scale cycle of subdominants, to E major in the final movement.
Violinist Adriel Sloss plays Mozart's Concerto for Violin and orchestra No. 5 with the Kindred Spirits Orchestra.