Leoš Janáček’s Piano Concertino, in confrontation with the elemental music whose roots grow from the rich culture of Romania, will be presented by artists who have this music inherently in their blood: the energetic Romanian pianist Daniel Ciobanu and the Romanian Chamber Orchestra with conductor Gabriel Bebeselea.

PROGRAMME CHANGE

ORIGINAL PROGRAMME

George Enescu
Pastorale fantaisie

Dinu Lipatti
Concertino in Classical Style op. 3

Leoš Janáček
Concertino, JW VII/11

György Ligeti
Concert Românesc

NEW PROGRAMME

Béla Bartók
Romanian Folk Dances, BB 76

Leoš Janáček
Concertino, JW VII/11

Dinu Lipatti
Concertino in Classical Style op. 3

George Enescu
Octet in C major op. 7

Daniel Ciobanu – piano
Romanian Chamber Orchestra
Gabriel Bebeselea – conductor

Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances were composed in 1915, originally as a piano cycle, and two years later the composer arranged them for small orchestra. In them, Bartók draws on authentic melodies that he recorded during his collecting trips through Transylvania. The short, highly concentrated movements capture the vitality, rhythmic sharpness and distinctive colour of Romanian folklore, which became one of the important sources of inspiration for 20th-century music. Leoš Janáček’s Concertino for piano and chamber ensemble, written in 1925, presents a highly distinctive sound world which, like Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen, turns towards the world of nature. “There is a cricket, little flies, a deer – a friendly brook – and man,” Janáček wrote of the work to Kamila Stösslová. Even a hundred years after the premiere of the Concertino, this jewel of chamber music still radiates extraordinary youthful energy and freshness. Dinu Lipatti was also loosely connected with George Enescu, who supported his talent from an early age. Lipatti entered music history above all as an outstanding pianist, although he also devoted himself to composition to a lesser extent. His Concertino in Classical Style, Op. 3, written in 1936, reflects the influence of the music of Joseph Haydn and Johann Sebastian Bach, transformed into an elegant, transparent and playful neoclassical form. The evening will conclude with George Enescu’s Octet in C major, Op. 7, a work by a young composer on the threshold of an extraordinary international career. Enescu completed it in 1900, when he was nineteen, and already in this large-scale composition for string octet he demonstrated remarkable compositional maturity. The work combines late-Romantic expressiveness, rich melodic writing and an almost symphonic mode of thought with chamber-like subtlety and detailed attention to the sound of the individual instruments.