Three worlds of sound: Stravinsky, Escaich and Dvořák under the baton of Alain Altinoglu

This Friday, June 6^th, 2025, I invite you to listen to the concert of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra in live broadcast. On the stage of the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, the musicians will perform a program that combines the sobriety of early modernism, the introspective anxieties of contemporary creation and the generous romanticism of the 19th century, in works by Igor Stravinsky, Thierry Escaich and Antonin Dvořák. The soloist for the evening is cellist Gautier Capucon, and Alain Altinoglu is conducting. The broadcast starts at 9 p.m.

Cellist Gautier Capuçon, a renowned French cellist with an impressive international career, plays the solo score of Thierry Escaich's second concerto for cello and orchestra, entitled "Les Chants de l'Aube". The evening opens with Igor Stravinsky's Symphonies for wind instruments and closes, after a break, with Antonín Dvořák's much-loved Ninth Symphony 'From the New World'.

The concert opens with Symphonies of Wind Instruments, a score written in 1920 exclusively for winds and percussion and dedicated to the memory of Claude Debussy. At the center of the program is Les Chants de l'Aube, Concerto No. 2 for cello and orchestra by Thierry Escaich. The opus is dedicated to the cellist Gautier Capucon, who premiered in Leipzig under the baton of Andris Nelsons in March 2023. Thierry Escaich is a French composer and organist, member of the French Academy of Fine Arts, He combines in his music the lyricism "inherited" from Franck and Dutilleux with a modern rhythmic energy and a refined palette of harmonies. The Concerto score was finalized in 2021 and is conceived as a sonic meditation on the passage between night and day - hence the title: Songs of Dawn.

The musical evening at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt closes with one of the most beloved symphonic creations dating from the late 19th century: the Symphony No. 9 in E minor, op. 95, known as From the New World. Written in 1893, when Dvořák was at the helm of the New York Conservatory, the symphony is often seen as an example of a synthesis of Slavic lyricism and American influences. In reality, theAfrican-American and Native American influences are rather subtle, but Dvořák manages to create an atmosphere of freshness and aspiration that immediately resonated with American and European audiences alike. The famous themes of movements II (Largo) and IV (Allegro con fuoco) are now part of the collective aural imagination, but they remain fertile in each new performance.

In between the live broadcast, I invite you to watch an interview with violinist Florin Iliescu, concert-master of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.