Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra | Gergely Madaras, Conductor | Alina Pogostkina, violin

Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra

Gergely Madaras, Conductor

Alina Pogostkina, Violin

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The Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Hungarian conductor Gergely Madaras, also the chief conductor of the Liege Philharmonic Orchestra, and as a soloist we will have the opportunity to experience the unique Alina Pogostkina, a violinist with a world-class career. The program will include works by Felix Mendelssohn, as well as his sister, Fanny Mendelssohn.

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PROGRAMME: 

Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel: Overture in C major

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Violin Concerto and Orchestra in E minor, op. 64

           Allegro molto appassionato

           Andante

           Allegretto no troppo. Allegro molto vivace

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Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Symphony No. 4 in A major, “Italian”

           Allegro vivace

           Andante con moto

           Con moto moderato

           Saltarello. Presto

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MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAMME:

Notes by Dina Puhovski

She was a composer with an oeuvre of nearly 500 works, one of the first women to write a string quartet, a pianist, conductor and music promoter, but she is best known as the famous composer’s sister: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, or Fanny Hensel (b. Fanny Cäcilie Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Hamburg, 1805 – Berlin, 1847) received musical training from an early age, just like her brother Felix, but her family believed that she practiced the piano too much for her age. Four years younger than her brother, the renowned composer whose works are also on this evening’s programme, she was his confidante and the first one to hear his works; Felix died only a few months after her. When she was a young girl, their father noticed that she had ‘fingers for Bach’s fugues’, and at the age of thirteen she was able to play the entire Well-Tempered Clavier by heart. However, societal expectations of women in the 19th century, as well as those of her family, made it clear to her that a real, public career in music was not for her. A letter from her father has been preserved in which he states that music was a suitable professional choice for her brother, but for her, music had to remain an ‘ornament’. She continued to compose, but it was not until a few years before her death that she published her first works; before that, six of her songs had been published under her brother’s name.

Fanny Mendelssohn married the court painter Wilhelm Hensel. For almost 25 years, she organized Sunday concerts at her grandmother’s house and often played at them. Her works, which have been performed much more frequently in recent decades, are influenced by Beethoven, Bach – whose music she and her brother rescued from oblivion by introducing it to a new generation – and, of course, her brother, and she most likely also influenced his music. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel wrote piano pieces, songs, chamber music, cantatas and oratorios. In the Overture in C major, her only piece composed exclusively for the orchestra, after a slow introduction, she develops a skilful interplay between strings and wind instruments. She wrote it around 1832 and it was not published until 1994.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (b. Jacob Ludwig Felix M., Hamburg, 1809 – Leipzig, 1847) also played the piano, violin and viola and took lessons in composition from a young age. He attended Karl Zelter’s Sing-Akademie, where he later conducted the performance of the rediscovered St Mathew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach – a composer whose works fascinated him – introducing the nineteenth-century audiences to the forgotten and, as was considered at the time, ‘difficult’ genius. At the age of twelve, he met Goethe in Weimar, who compared him to Mozart and supported his composing. His work was influenced by collaboration with his sister Fanny, and his travels around Italy, England and Scotland. He served as music director in Düsseldorf and conductor at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, where he was one of the founders of the Conservatory. Light, melodious and technically refined, Mendelssohn’s works include numerous piano pieces, symphonies, oratorios, classical string quartets, and the popular Violin Concerto.

Mendelssohn wrote the Violin Concerto, Op. 64, in E minor, for his friend, violinist Ferdinand David – concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which Mendelssohn conducted – to showcase David’s talent. It took him six years to complete it, with numerous revisions, and during that time he maintained contact with David – thus beginning what would become a 19th-century tradition of writing concertos in collaboration with the violinist. The concerto, which is required reading for every violinist and which influenced many composers, included many novel features – the violin ‘bravely’ enters right at the beginning, without waiting for the orchestra, while later it occasionally serves only as an ‘accompaniment’ for the orchestra; the cadenza, which was written out in full, was not in the expected place within the work. The movements of the concerto are actually joined together – the second begins immediately after the first, and only a passage comes before the third; it is believed that the unusual joining of the movements was intended to prevent the audience from clapping between movements.

In late 1830, Mendelssohn travelled to Italy, where he spent ten months, visiting a number of cities. He poured his impressions into a series of watercolours and sketches, and then into Symphony No. 4, ‘Italian’. However, he uses Italian music only in the fourth movement, a musical chase based on the Neapolitan saltarello dance, while in the previous movements he indirectly conveys his impressions of the Mediterranean landscape, the sun, religious processions (which inspired the Andante), and architecture (the Minuet). He conducted the premiere of the Symphony in London in 1833, and revised it several times after that, despite its success and the opinion that it was the ‘brightest’ and the ‘most mature’ piece he had written up to that point. Mendelssohn once described this symphony as ‘blue sky in A major’.