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VFO / SHANI / BARENBOIM / WEILERSTEIN / KANTOROW
Brahms, Strauss
Lahav Shani conducts the VFO in a multi-soloist night, Alexandre Kantorow joining them for Brahms’s mighty Second Piano Concerto, before cellist Alisa Weilerstein and violist Michael Barenboim play the lead roles in Strauss’s ‘Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character,’ Don Quixotte.
Programme
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major Op. 83
Interval
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)
Don Quixote Op. 35
Distribution
- Verbier Festival Orchestra
- Lahav Shani conductor
- Michael Barenboim viola
- Alisa Weilerstein cello
- Alexandre Kantorow piano
When Brahms composed his Second Piano Concerto in 1881, it set a new benchmark for size and scope. Scored in four movements rather than the usual three, its opening is strikingly original: a noble horn call, answered by the piano, which then launches into a mood-switching cadenza. The second movement is an impassioned scherzo, followed by an Andante whose music is based on its initial solo cello song, and a rondo finale blending playfulness with grandeur. Strauss’s Don Quixotte of 1897 is a programmatic theme and variations on the famed Cervantes novel about an elderly hidalgo who goes mad, imagines himself to be a knight errant, and sets off on adventure. Casting a cello as ‘Don Quixotte’ and a viola as his servant, Sancho Panza, Strauss’s colourful score brilliantly depicts events such as the mistaking of a flock of sheep for an enemy army (atonal baa-ing). Eventually sanity is restored, and the weary gentleman dies peacefully on a downwards glissando.