The Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Carlo Tenan, will first play the Johannesburg Festival Overture, a lively piece by the British composer William Walton (1902-1983) that was written in 1956 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the city of Johannesburg. This overture, which incorporates some African themes, was specially commissioned for the event; the composer himself described it as ‘a non-stop gallop … slightly crazy, hilarious and vulgar’. The orchestra will then accompany the Chinese violinist Ziyu He in the three-movement Violin Concerto by another British composer – this time, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). The concerto, written in 1938-1939 (mostly while Britten was staying with Aaron Copland in the USA, though he completed it in Quebec), was revised three times during the 1950s. It exhibits an unusual sequence of movements, the second being an animated – even wild – scherzo and the third a slow passacaglia (i.e., a set of variations on a ground bass).
Violinist Ziyu He, who since 2011 has been living in Salzburg, won the Eurovision Young Musicians’ Competition in Cologne in 2014. Two years later, he won the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin Competition in London for his performance of Paganini’s Introduction and Variations in G major.
In the second half, the orchestra will first play Wagner’s overture to his 1845 opera Tannhäuser, a work that focusses on two of the composer’s favourite themes: the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through love. They will then perform Gustav Mahler’s five-movement Symphony No 10 in F sharp major, written in 1910. Only the first movement was reasonably complete before he passed away the following year; the others were still in draft form. This, his last composition, is commonly regarded as his most dissonant work. The reasons for this are not hard to find: Mahler knew that his heart was failing, and had just found out that his wife Alma had had an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. (He subsequently sought counselling from Sigmund Freud.) On the last page of the final movement, he wrote: für dich leben! für dich sterben! (‘To live for you! To die for you!’). Under the last phrase, the exclamation Almschi!, his pet name for Alma, can be seen.
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
