Pannon Philharmonic

Conductor

Gilbert Varga

Soloist

Zoltán Fejérvári

piano

About the Programme

The programme including pieces by Russian composers gives us an insight into the various periods of the Romantic era. Between 1904 and 1909, Anatoly Ljadov composed three orchestral tale images. Tonight, you can hear the second of them: The Enchanted Lake. Originally, it was meant to be a grand opera but its atmosphere is captured in this symphonic poem lasting only for a few minutes. Sergei Rachmaninov's Rhapsody for piano and symphonic orchestra is from several years later; it is yet a quintessentially romantic work, which commemorates one of the greatest violin virtuosi of the 19th century. The final piece is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5,written in 1888, in which the composer makes a close connection between the certain movements using a cyclically returning theme. In the World War II, during the siege of Leningrad, this Tchaikovsky work had become one of the symbolic pieces of the defenders of the city. Nothing shows the significance of this work better than the fact that Dmitri Shostakovich ‘recycled’ a part of it in his Leningrad Symphony.