Glinka / Dohnányi / Tchaikovsky
Dirk Kaftan, General Music Director in Bonn, brings epochal Eastern European compositions to the Hanseatic and University City of Rostock for his Rostock debut. Mikhail Glinka's overture to the opera Ruslan and Ludmilla, written directly for the orchestra, often during rehearsals in the director's room, is a milestone in Russian music. And Peter Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, completed in 1888 after the European tour, is one of his most popular along with the two neighboring symphonies. Both wistfully cantabile and rebelliously urgent passages are captivating in this logically shaped work, behind which the theme of fate is concealed.
The lesser-known music of the Hungarian composer and pianist Ernst von Dohnányi, born in 1877, also surprises with its ideas and brilliant orchestral writing. In his variations on a children's song, the romantic tone of his great role model Johannes Brahms is unmistakable. The young pianist and composer Aris Alexander Blettenberg has been invited to perform with the Rostock orchestra for the second time after his guest concert in Vienna last year.
