Under the direction of its chief conductor Rafael Payare, the San Diego Symphony Orchestra presents a programme of vivid musical storytelling, populated by mythical blue deer, a magical bird and figures driven by darker intentions. Violin star Leonidas Kavakos adds Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, a work that grants the soloist scarcely a moment’s respite while charting the composer’s emotional world between fear and defiance under Stalin’s regime.
The beginning and end of the concert are both shaped by fantastical creatures. Stravinsky’s celebrated ballet suite vividly recounts the tale of Prince Ivan, who frees the magical Firebird and, with its help, defeats the sorcerer Kashchei. In turn, Gabriela Ortiz follows the Blue Deer, a mythical figure from her native Mexico. In Huichol tradition, contact with the Blue Deer is established through a hallucinogenic cactus, and the creature is revered as a spiritual healer and guide to an unseen world.
The programme also includes the suite from Béla Bartók’s ballet »The Miraculous Mandarin«, a work that caused a scandal at its premiere. None other than Konrad Adenauer, then Mayor of Cologne, ensured that performances were initially banned. For audiences of the 1920s, the ballet’s themes of prostitution, exploitation and murder were considered too explicit. Today, however, it fits perfectly with the theme of the Hamburg International Music Festival 2027: »Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll«. Bartók’s intensely expressive musical language, which once unsettled audiences, has long since secured the work a place in the concert repertoire.
PERFORMERS
San Diego Symphony orchestra
Leonidas Kavakos violin
Rafael Payare conductor
PROGRAM
Gabriela Ortiz
Kauyumari
Dmitri Schostakowitsch
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 in A minor, Op. 77
- Interval -
Béla Bartók
Suite from »The Miraculous Mandarin«, Sz 73
Igor Strawinsky
L’oiseau de feu (The Firebird)
