Maestro Ville Matvejeff is coming back to the symphony concerts in Rijeka, conducting the concert Grieg, Beethoven, Palanović on Tuesday 20th March 2018, beginning at 19:30 hours.
The concert features the world premiere of the Symphony Clear Day (Jasan dan) that Dubravko Palanović, one of the most talented Croatian composers of the younger generation wrote specially for the Rijeka Opera, namely the Orchestra and Chorus of the Ivan pl. Zajc Opera, with mezzosoprano Ivana Srbljan as a soloists in its first performance. “It was the three poems by Ivan Goran Kovačić – Clear day (Jasan dan, 1942), Dark Age (Mračno doba, 1941) and Calm (Smirenje,1931) that were for Palanović the source and inspiration for this work, having made them part of the Symphony. Thus, it is a symphony-cantata, featuring also human voice, the chorus and mezzosoprano solo, besides the big orchestra. Each of the chosen poems by Goran, brings not only the powerful and intoxicating images of nature, intensive emotional poet’s moods, metaphors, premonitions and echoes of events those times, autobiographical states, but they a priori contain the music, a rhythmically sophisticated range of accents that are masterly composed into verses, to be heard and ‘materialised’ only by refined the ear of the divinely inspired poet.” That is what the musicologist Davor Merkeš has written about the Symphony Clear Day (Jasan dan), concluding: “The Symphony captivates with the beauty and wealth of harmonic solutions, musical ideas and a profoundly experienced transformation of the metaphysical beauty of verses intro just as an abstract space of the sound: in his work Palanović accomplishes the synesthetic synthesis of thoughts, strong and intense poet’s images and the gorgeous world of tones of the great emotional charge.”
Dubravko Palanović (1977) is a Croatian composer and double bass musician. He has composed for prominent ensembles, philharmonics and orchestras. Palanović is the founder of the Acoustic Project ensemble, in which he composes, makes arrangements and plays with distinguished Croatian musicians, mostly members of the Zagreb Philharmonic. His Symphony, composed specifically for the Rijeka Opera, he bases upon the poetry of Ivan Goran Kovačić.
Apart from this new work,, famous works of two musical geniuses will be performed in the first part of the concert, namely, Peer Gynt’s Suite No.1 by Edvard Grieg and Symphony No. 1 by Ludwig van Beethoven. The icon of the Norwegian music and eminent representative of nationally driven Romantics, composer, pianist and conductor Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907) composed in the year 1876, incidental music after the play of the same name by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen from 1867. Peer Gynt strengthened Grieg’s position of the greatest Norwegian composer, while it also helped establish Ibsen’s five-act play in verses as a masterpiece on the international scene. Quests, virtues and flaws, torments and foolishness, common to all the mankind, make part of Ibsen’s character Peer Gynt; they are musically transposed into a unique Grieg’s combination of Norwegian folklore and classical Romantic style in 26 movements, out of which the composer singled out two orchestral four-movement suites, Suite No. 1, Op. 46 and Suite No. 2, Op. 55. They have remained Grieg’s most famous works, frequently performed and used also in popular culture.
Symphony No. 1, by the greatest symphony composer ever, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827), dedicated to Baron Gottfried van Swieten (Haydn’s, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s patron) was composed in the dawn of the new century, namely, from the year 1799 to the year 1800, in the composer’s early phase. Beethoven’s contemporaries said that his symphony had changed the conception of the genre, attaching to it attributes as masterpiece and originality, inventiveness and recognisability, melody richness and instrumentation that one can undoubtedly place next to the one of Mozart and Haydn, with whose compositions it also had a world premiere performance in Vienna in 1800.
An hour before the concert, at 18:30 hours precisely, the presentation of the latest book by the renowned musical critic Bosiljka Peri Perić Kempf ”U potrazi za Ivom Malecom” (In search of Ivo Malec) will take place in the Theatre foyer.
