Blue Subscription Series 5

Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra
Slovenian Chamber Choir
conductor Emmanuel Villaume
Piotr Anderszewski piano

C. Debussy: Nocturnes
W. A. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466
A. Kumar: New work
Ch. Gounod: Symphony No. 1 in D major
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In a letter to Eugène Ysaÿe, Claude Debussy wrote that "the three Nocturnes for violin and orchestra… are an experiment with various combinations of the same colour, as in a painter’s study in grey". The composer later abandoned this version and only in the period 1897-99 gave the Nocturnes the form we know today. According to Debussy, "it is not a case of the typical form of the nocturne, but rather of all of the diverse impressions and special effects that the word arouses in us."
In 1785, Leopold Mozart wrote to his daughter Nannerl: "In the evening there was the first of six Friday concerts in the city hall ‘Zur Mehlgrub’, at which Amadeus performed his superb Concerto in G minor for the first time. A number of men of the highest classes had gathered and each of them had paid one ‘souverain d’or’ or three ducats to attend the series of six concerts. The concert was incomparable, the orchestra excellent…". For a long time, Mozart’s first concerto in a minor key was also the most frequently performed of all of his twenty seven works of this kind.
Aldo Kumar, a recipient of this year’s Prešeren Fund Prize, cultivates a sensitive attitude towards the various functions of music in the contemporary world: he develops the ‘classical’ musical tradition and imaginatively interweaves it with the sister art forms of theatre and film. His new work in our programme will be just another tiny stone and this colourful mosaic.
Charles Gounod’s First Symphony demonstrates the composer’s mastery of traditional form and his skilful use of orchestration. It contains echoes of Schubert’s early symphonic creativity, but (knowing that Gounod was a pupil of Bizet) we can also detect numerous parallels with a more popular work, Symphony by Georges Bizet.