Ludwig van Beethoven Piano concerto no. 3 in C minor op. 37 Fazil SaySilk Road Periklis KoukosIn Memoriam Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony no. 7 in A major op. 92 Conductor Constantinos Carydis / Piano Fazil Say
First Residence-Concert of the 2010/2011 Season
Within the framework of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s Residence NRW, the orchestra was invited in the summer of 2009 to co-open the Cologne Philharmonic Hall’s new season. Over the course of an entire day, around 10,000 visitors took the opportunity to observe an open rehearsal, attend a „meet the orchestra“ session, hear a chamber music concert or come to the season’s opening concert that evening. The MCO information booth was continuously surrounded by curious audience members, and by the end of the day the enthusiastic response was so clear that the host announced an invitation for the 2010/2011 season right then and there.
To that effect, the MCO, conductor Constantinos Carydis and pianist Fazil Say will travel to Cologne at the beginning of September to recreate a program first played in July 2010 in Athens. From Beethovens Third Piano Concerto and Seventh Symphony to Fazil Say’s Silk Road and Periklis Koukos’ In Memoriam, Western European classical music will be interwoven with Southeast Europe’s modern movement.
Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto was first played in Vienna in April of 1803. The composer took up an impulse from Mozart and developed it several steps further: the piano becomes an equal partner in dialogue with the orchestra, the instrumental groupings are differentiated from movement to movement, and finally at the end of the last movement Beethoven dramatically changes the key. Exactly ten years later, the composer conducted his own Symphony No. 7 in A Major. In composing symphonies he had already established a new order of magnitude; in the seventh, he primarily resumes that which he had already begun in the sixth. But a new strength in subjective expression, a new vehemence appears, with which Beethoven forms a symphonic „I“ comparable to the first-person narrative voice in literature.
Fazil Say is at home artistically on both sides of the Bosphorus, since he brings the traditions of European classical music to his native Turkey but also shares the music of his homeland – in all its variety – with audiences across the world. His concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, Silk Road, takes the listener on a journey along the legendary route of the title, the ancient commercial highway between China and Europe. The four movements, like the stations of a caravan, are linked to one another by a Chinese gong. They tell of the philosophy of Tibet, the dances of India, and the clashes of disparate religions in Mesopotamia, until at last reaching, in the final movement, Say’s home of Anatolia, the „mother of the earth.“ The piece quotes copiously from the musical traditions of the stops along the Silk Road, with Arabic folklore incorporated along with Indian dance and Anatolian songs.
As one of Greece’s most significant contemporary composers as well as artistic director of the national conservatory, Periklis Koukos plays a prominent role in Greek musical life. The catalog of his works encompasses opera, theater music, orchestral pieces and chamber music.
The Cologne Philharmonic is one of three concert halls in North Rhine-Westphalia that, together with the Orchestra Center?NRW, host the MCO’s Residence NRW. Four concerts will take place here during the 2010/2011 season, of which two occur in the framework of the MCO Academy. In December 2010, for instance, Ton Koopman will conduct the MCO with young musicians of the Orchestra Center in an MCO Academy concert. On the program are works by Handel, C. P. E. Bach and Mozart.
