From Afar

Contemporary music has many faces. In Rodin's work, one can hear inspiration from the classical canon, yet it is distinctly 21st-century music, skillfully blending pure harmony and dissonance, lyrical and dramatic moments, impressionism, and expressionism.

On the other hand, Vasks, in his nostalgic Violin Concerto Distant Light, draws from Latvian folk music. The composer weaves contrasting sections of the piece like a tapestry, shimmering like stars in the night sky, coming and going like childhood memories.

The year 1815 marked an extraordinary creative explosion in Schubert's life, a mystery that musicologists have pondered for over two centuries. During that time, he composed two hundred works, including the Symphony No. 3 in D major, on which he worked for barely a month. Schubert always felt indebted to Beethoven. However, listening to this perhaps most concise of his symphonies, it is easy to hear that the then eighteen-year-old Schubert drew no less inspiration from Mozart and Haydn, and even Rossini. The symphony ends with a lively and most "Beethovenian" fourth movement in the energetic rhythm of an Italian tarantella.

It was precisely the travels through Italy, Germany, and Hungary that resulted in eight remarkable suites by Jules Massenet, from which we will hear the fifth – Scènes napolitaines (Scenes from Naples). Like a painter, the French composer captured not only the tarantella's characteristic rhythm but also the religious procession marching through the city's streets and the joyful celebration of the crowd.