PIOTR ILICH CHAIKÓVSKI: Romeo and Juliet, Fantasy Overture
ROBERT SCHUMANN: Konzcertstück for four horns and orchestra, in F Major, Op.86
RICHARD STRAUSS: The Knight of the Rose, Suite TrV 227d, Op.59
Horn I: Matías Piñeira
Horn II: Joaquín Morillo Rico
Horn III: Juan Manuel Gómez
Horn IV: Adrián Díaz Martínez
Conductor: Shi-Yeon Sung
Program notes
"What's in a name? The phrase that the English bard put into Juliet's mouth applies to Tchaikovsky's music. There are no words to describe the intensity with which passion manifests itself in the ‘love theme’ of this Overture-Fantasy. The Russian composer poured out his always volcanic feelings while constructing an orchestrally perfect piece, a supreme example of programmatic music.
Between Strauss's rose and Shakespeare's, the four horns of Schumann's concerto appear to us as golden roses of brass and nickel, impregnated with the perfume of German romanticism. The Chilean hornist Matías Piñeira, soloist of the Munich Philharmonic, leads the performance of this piece composed in 1849. In it Robert Schumann endowed this heroic instrument with spectacular expressive qualities.
A ray of imperial light dawns in the Marshal's bedchamber, in the perfumed gardens of Vienna the bearer of the silver rose leaves a trail of dizzying waltzes. When Richard Strauss premiered the opera The Knight of the Rose from the masterly libretto by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1911, no one could have foreseen the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which this work was perhaps the swan song. Its success was worldwide and resounding, and it remains today one of the most performed operas. The suite arranged by Strauss, in which the Danubian waltzes stand out, takes us back to the classical and baroque salons of the time of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
José María Jurado García-Posada