KZN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA WINTER SEASON SYMPHONY 3

Thu Jun 22, 19:00 - Thu Jun 22, 21:30

Playhouse Opera Theatre

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World Symphony Series Winter Season Concert 3

Playhouse Opera Theatre ~ 22 June 2023 ~ 19h00



Conductor: Daniel Boico

Soloist: Yeon-Min Park, piano


Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S.514

Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1, S.124 in E-flat Major 

Dvorák: Symphony No. 8, Op. 88 in G Major



KZN Philharmonic concert-goers will welcome the return of Daniel Boico, the Orchestra’s Associate Principal guest conductor for the third concert of the Winter Season. Boico opens with Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz known for its passion, sensuality and powerful emotional impact. James Huneker described the work's "languorous syncopated melody" as "one of the most voluptuous episodes outside of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde score". The waltz a typical example of program music, taking for its program an episode from Nikolaus Len Yeon-Min au's 1836 verse drama Faust (as opposed to Goethe's Faust). The work opens a wedding feast in the village inn, with Faust taking part in the festivities. Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains. The amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blooded village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song.


The evening’s ferociously taxing centrepiece showcases the virtuosic prowess of Yeon-Min, who is set to pit himself against the formidable technical hurdles with which Liszt challenged himself and generations of successors through subsequent generations. The evening closes with radical change in colour.


Dvorák composed his Symphony No. 8 in 1889 to celebrate his election to the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and Arts. The composer himself conducted the premiere in Prague on 2 February 1890. In contrast to his other symphonies, Dvorák set out to achieve a marked difference with his Eighth from the results he had achieved with Symphony No. 7, a stormy romantic work. No. 8 is richly imbued with a sunny atmosphere evoked in a fresh, new way. Its cheery and lyrical ethos draws its inspiration more from the Bohemian folk music that Dvorák loved.

DIRECTIONS

KZN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA WINTER SEASON SYMPHONY 3
Playhouse Opera Theatre
231 Smith St, Durban Central, Durban, 4001
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