Radio Concert Season
National Radio Orchestra - live broadcast
Friday, 29 October 2010
, 19.00
Fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character bring a famous character, a ‘beautiful lunatic’ of Spanish literature, a hidalgo in whose eyes vulgarity gains nobleness, ugliness is …’distorting’ into elegance and windmills’ blades are but the sniffing growls of grumbling dragons on the concert stage.
Written and published at the beginning of the 17th century (1605-1615), Miguel de Cervantes’ novella El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha is the landmark of the Iberian Golden Age. Almost three centuries separate the novella from the Op. No. 25 signed by Richard Strauss (1897). The charm of the orchestration (wonderfully ingenious, as almost any Strauss score is) paints with sounds the idyllic characters and their hilariously giddy actions …
Another character, much more lucid and master on her facts is Salome, the beautiful and fatally dangerous daughter of Herodias. The attraction point of Strauss’ works (having a literary pillar in the homonymous work of Oscar Wilde) is the famous Dance of the seven veils where Salome proves to be a …royal practitioner of the ’oldest job in the world’, unveiling with parsimony the charms of a young body …in order to obtain Herod’s promise to fulfill her a wish. ‘Be careful what you wish for!’ the Chinese would say and rightly so… as the fulfilling (John the Baptist’s head) and Salome’s macabre kiss on his cold lips fates his death.
The concert of the National Radio Orchestra on October 29th 2010 is going to be conducted by Jin Wang and in the Violin Concerto Op.35 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the soloist is violinist Alexandru Tomescu . The programme will also include two works by Richard Strauss: the symphonic poem Don Quixote and Salome’s Dance from the homonymous work.
Sorina Goia
Translated by Zenovia Popa and Elena Gheorghe
MTTLC, Bucharest University
Translated by Zenovia Popa and Elena Gheorghe
MTTLC, Bucharest University
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