The New Year’s concert will be marked by romance, elegance and irresistible American swing! Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake will recall the beauty and power of the most famous ballet of all time, while Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and the symphonic poem An American in Paris will fill the Universe Hall with the rhythm of jazz and enchant with their energy and imagination.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Swan Lake — selection of music from the ballet

George Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue

George Gershwin
An American in Paris

Alexei Volodin – piano
Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
Daniel Raiskin – conductor

We will welcome the new year with music from the most famous classical ballet of all time — Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. This unique neo-romantic masterpiece from 1877, inspired by a Scandinavian ballad about Princess Odette, who is transformed into a swan and doomed to tragic love with Prince Siegfried, continues to move audiences worldwide.

Rhapsody in Blue is arguably George Gershwin’s most famous work. This sparkling “jazz piano concerto” was composed in 1924 at the request of legendary bandleader Paul Whiteman. At its New York premiere, with Gershwin himself at the piano, the audience included such luminaries as Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Heifetz, and Stokowski. Despite claims that Gershwin improvised many passages and simply gave Whiteman cues when to join in, the work was an instant triumph.

Gershwin’s An American in Paris (1928) is his only jazz-infused “symphonic poem.” It captures the impressions of an American strolling along the Champs-Élysées, the effects of French wine, the sounds of the cancan, the bustling boulevards, and the ever-present honking of Parisian taxi horns — evoked in the orchestra by four specially tuned car horns.