Paul Daniel & Martin Grubinger

Sunday, 25 February 2018, 7.00 pm
Munich, Gasteig

Programme

Kalevi Aho
"Sieidi" Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra

Interval

Claude Debussy
"La mer" - (Auszüge)

Alexander Skrjabin
Symphony No 4, op 54 "The Poem of Ecstasy"

Paul Daniel, Conductor

Martin Grubinger, Percussion

Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks

Download Programme Booklet in German.

Audiences can expect to enjoy an evening of ecstatic sounds when the British conductor Paul Daniel returns to the helm of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Always open to unusual sonorities, he will present one of Claude Debussy’s most richly coloured works: the “Three Symphonic Sketches” known as La Mer. Here Debussy was concerned less with portraying the sea than with capturing the moods, immensity and primal force of the natural elements. Debussy’s piece leads seamlessly into the impressionistic beginning of Le Poème de l’exstase, a symphonic poem by the pioneering Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. With its gigantic orchestral forces, this work fully lives up to its title: Scriabin, a believer in synæsthesia (the confluence of the arts), starts his work in a mystical abyss and ends it in a final explosion of light and colour intended, as he put it, “to inundate the entire world”. Opening this exciting evening is sonic frenzy of a special sort as star percussionist Martin Grubinger performs a percussion concerto by the doyen of Finnish composers, Kalevi Aho. Its mysterious title, Sieidi, refers to a cultic site of the Sami people in Lapland. Fittingly, Aho’s music sounds almost like a ritual, combining ethereal sonorities with Arabic rhythms and violent pulsations. Yet another brilliant tour de force for the human dynamo that is Martin Grubinger!