Archived performance
Performance details
Friday 13 March 2020 at 7.30pm
Saturday 14 March 2020 at 7.30pm
Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall
Program
Kodály Dances of Galanta
Bloch Schelomo
Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade
Featuring
Miguel Harth Bedoya conductor
Timo-Veikko Valve cello
About this performance
There are 1001 reasons to fall in love with this music.
Great Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov lays the foundations for this bright, colourful and gorgeously textured evocation of the exotic.
She was the woman who spun her own fate from the threads of narrative: Scheherazade, the star and storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights. She famously escaped death by drawing her executioner further and further into the tale. It’s a trait Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov would employ in the symphonic suite he named after the cunning narrator; with sweeping and immersive instrumentation.
Scheherazade was composed in 1888, and draws on Rimsky-Korsakov’s career as an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy. He had a lifelong fascination with folklore and his role as an inspector of Naval bands gave him a long association with the ocean. The suite conjures the brine and the sea-spray that would accompany Sinbad on his many journeys, and brims with exoticism. Under the baton of Peruvian conductor Miguel Harth Bedoya, making his MSO debut, it will soar like the chronicles of old.
Exoticism and passion for folk music drove Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály to the creation of Dances of Galánta, based on the musical traditions of what is now part of Slovakia. Richly evocative of Romani culture, it is a work of complexity and romance.
COVID-19 Addendum
Dutch cellist Harriet Krijgh was unable to travel to Melbourne for this performance due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so Timo-Veikko Valve performed Bloch's Schelomo on 13 and 14 March. On 15 March the MSO live-streamed a portion of this performance from an empty Hamer Hall.
