Grace, variety, richness of colour – this is what Suite No. 1 from Bizet’s incidental music to L’Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles) offers. Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor dazzles the listener with its stylistic diversity, while Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 in F major is quite the opposite: an extremely unified piece of music that faithfully represents the composer’s distinctive, personal language.
On 13 May at MÜPA, the fifth concert in the Hungarian National Philharmonic’s Kocsis subscription series will be conducted by its principal music director, Vashegyi György. The piano concerto promises exciting moments: its soloist, the prodigiously talented Russian virtuoso Alexander Malofeev, aged just twenty-three, returns to the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra after a successful earlier guest appearance.
Not only was Georges Bizet granted a mere thirty-six years by fate, but posterity has also reduced him to a one-work composer, deeming only his brilliant Carmen worthy of attention – even though this French Romantic of exceptional taste created much else of value. Now we can hear Suite No. 1 from his incidental music to Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles), which is full of invention, subtly blended colours and strong character.
Diversity is also a hallmark of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor – perhaps it was precisely this quality of the work that the eminent Polish pianist and composer Zygmunt Stojowski approached ironically when he joked that the composition begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach.
Stylistic heterogeneity, however, is not a feature of one of Brahms’s most popular works, the Symphony No. 3 in F major, which speaks in the composer’s most personal language from its first note to its last, strongly embodying the Brahmsian voice.
Georges BIZET: L’Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles) – Suite No. 1
Camille SAINT-SAËNS: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22
Johannes BRAHMS: Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90
Alexander Malofeev piano
Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Vashegyi György