KZN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA WINTER SEASON SYMPHONY 4
Thu Jun 29, 19:00 - Thu Jun 29, 21:30
Playhouse Opera Theatre
ABOUT
World Symphony Series Winter Season Concert 4
Playhouse Opera Theatre ~ 29 June 2023 ~ 19h00
Conductor: Lykele Temmingh
Soloist: Maria du Toit, clarinet
Beethoven: Egmont Overture
Temmingh: Concerto for Clarinet
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1, Op. 13 in g minor
Conductor Lykele Temmingh brings the curtain down on the KZN Philharmonic’s Winter Season with a programme that is bookended by two concert favourites, while offering listeners a rare encounter a major composition by his brother, the renowned South African composer, Roelof Temmingh.
Beethoven’s rugged Egmont Overture needs no introduction as one of the world's best known concert showpieces. Originally composed as the opening item of his incidental music to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1787 play, Beethoven’s magnificent composition soon took its place as a self-standing concert favourite, a status it proudly upholds to the present day .
The ‘discovery’ of the evening is the exquisitely scored Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra by the late Roelof Temmingh. It was expressly written for Maria du Toit, the foremost clarinettist of her generation in South Africa. Temmingh knew Ms du Toit from her school days, and then lectured her at Stellenbosch University. He was well acquainted with her playing and indicated his desire to write a concerto for her. A joint commission was acquired through the SAMRO Endowment for the National Arts and the Distell Foundation, and the work was completed in 2009.
The programme closes with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor, ‘Winter Dreams’. Composed in 1866, just after he accepted a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory, it is the composer's earliest notable work. The composer's brother Modest claimed this piece cost Tchaikovsky more labour and suffering than any of his other works. Nonetheless, he remained fond of it, writing to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck in 1883 that "although it is in many ways very immature, yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than any of my other more mature works." He dedicated the symphony to Nikolai Rubinstein. Its youthful freshness has an appeal all its own, that speaks to audiences, no matter how often it is played. The Russian master’s ‘Winter Dreams’ offers a touching and appropriate final salute to the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra’s Winter season audience.