The long-lived Jean Sibelius, who spoke Swedish as his mother tongue, was Finland's greatest composer of music, becoming the subject of great honour and even a cult figure during his lifetime. His works inspired by the culture of his homeland made him one of the most original composers of the fin de siècle period and the first half of the 20th century. His works being performed at this concert, however, were not drawn from the Finnish tradition, as his incidental music from 1905 was created for Maurice Maeterlinck's drama Pelléas et Mélisande, from which the nine-movement suite, one of his most popular concertos, was born. Nevertheless, the most frequently played composition in Sibelius's oeuvre is not this one, but rather a later opus: the concerto he wrote in 1904 and revised a year later, the Violin Concerto in D minor. This passionate work also has a Hungarian connection, as the revised version was dedicated to the then 12-year-old child prodigy Ferenc Vecsey. Sibelius's Violin Competition has since become a mandatory repertoire piece for every violinist, and this time it will be played by a likewise very young musician, the Egyptian-Hungarian Amira Abouzahra, born in 2005, who was also 12 years old when she won the Virtuosos talent search contest in 2017. The composers and works of the second part of the concert are related in several respects: Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin were classmates and then developed completely different musical languages. Dating from 1908, the symphonic poem The Island of the Dead was inspired by a painting by Arnold Böcklin, or more precisely, a black-and-white reproduction of it. After this composition, which also develops the melody of the Dies irae, we'll hear another work completed in 1908, one of the most significant ones from a composer who lived with the condition of synaesthesia, meaning that he associated sounds with colours: Scriabin's The Poem of Ecstasy, which he termed "the joy of liberated action”, uses his famous mystical chord.

Presented by: Concerto Budapest