First, the CRR Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of the Romanian conductor Cristian Lupeş (the manager of the Sibiu State Philharmonic Orchestra and the artistic director of Romania’s first festival of contemporary music), will play the first movement (entitled Kervan – ‘Caravan’) of the 1967 Orchestral Suite No 3 by Bülent Tarcan (1914-91). Prof. Tarcan was not only one of the pioneers of modern brain surgery in Turkey but also a composer: he was in fact a pupil of Cemal Reşit Rey at the State Conservatoire in Istanbul during the 1930s. ‘Caravan’ is intended to depict the gradual approach of a caravan and its departure across the deserted plains of Central Anatolia. The composer himself commented that this orchestral suite was written in a plain style that would allow audiences to understand the music – which is largely derived from Turkish folk motifs – without difficulty.
This will be followed by Béla Bartók’s Piano Concerto No 1 in E flat major, in which the soloist will be Toros Can. This work, composed in 1926, was premiered at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Frankfurt in 1927, with Bartók himself as soloist. (He was obliged to write works in which he could perform as soloist in order to earn his living.) Wikipedia offers the following analysis:
The concerto comes after an increased interest in Baroque music on the part of Bartók, which is demonstrated by such devices as the increased use of counterpoint. The work, however, retains the harshness and dissonance that is characteristic of Bartók. Here, as elsewhere in Bartók’s output, the piano is used percussively. The importance of the other percussion instruments is illustrated by Bartók’s note: ‘The percussion (including timpani) must be placed directly next to the piano (behind the piano).’
Finally, the orchestra will play The Planets, an orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934), the 150th anniversary of whose birth is being celebrated this year. Each of the seven movements of this work, written between 1914 and 1917, is intended to depict one of the planets Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In the last movement, the orchestra is joined by an offstage female chorus – a device that Debussy had used in the last movement of his Nocturnes (1900). Holst was interested in astrology, and enjoyed setting up horoscopes; each movement is intended to portray the inner nature of the planet concerned and its effects on people’s psychology.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
