Dear Friends of the National Gallery of Slovenia and the Slovene Philharmonic String Chamber Orchestra!
We could describe the eighth season of the Harmony of the Spheres series as the season of anniversaries and soloists for several reasons. In the line of concerts we shall present music of the Viennese Neoclassicism, French Baroque, Czech masters of music for strings, we shall celebrate the 200th anniversary of F. Mendelssohn's birth and we shall close the series, as usual, with Slovene music and art. In a special evening we shall listen to the arias and orchestral music of G. F. Händl to pay tribute to the 250th anniversary of the composer's death. In the year 2008, when our Slovene Philharmonic is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its orchestra and its sixtieth season after World War II, the Slovene Philharmonic String Chamber Orchestra celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. We have therefore invited several outstanding Slovene and foreign soloists to frost our music making: horn player of the Berlin Philharmonics Stefan Dohr, and solo horn player of the Slovene Philharmonic Andrej Žust, both of the former heads of the orchestra – art director Andrej Petrač and concertmaster Milan Kolbl, alto Markus Forster, and our regular guest mezzosoprano Mirjam Kalin. A new composition by Lojze Lebič will crown the series. Let his conviction that cooperation between the composer, musician and audience is a precondition to a successful concert performance be the means of saying thank you for your loyal support and an invitation to attend our series in the coming season.
We are doing our best to harmonize topics from the visual arts with the music programme. Franc Kavčič was a part of the Viennese milieu in which Mozart and Haydn produced their music. In the halls he decorated for the Viennese aristocratic society, contemporary music met painting. The French Baroque music will allow us to talk about the influence of French painters on the late Baroque Slovene painter Bergant and on the younger Kavčič. The inclusion of Janaček's Suite is a pretext for discussing the common ground shared by Czech national architecture and Jože Plečnik in Czech modern architecture. Händl's music will be introduced by the tempestuous marines of Pieter Mulier the Younger, and Krek's piece On the Way towards Light gives us an incentive to discuss the symbolic meanings of light in Slovene art of the earlier part of the 20th century. We should add the jubilee of the National Gallery of Slovenia to the music anniversaries. 18th September, 2008 marks the 90th anniversary of its foundation. Enjoy our festive programme and bring your friends to experience the Harmony of the Spheres!
Klemen Hvala , Art Director of SFCSO
Barbara Jaki, Director of National Gallery of Slovenia
Subscription price
Five concerts 60 €, single concert 15 €. Friends of the National Gallery of Slovenia have 25% discount on price for the entire season and 20% discount on price for single concert.
Subscription or single tickets available at the front desk of the National Gallery, Prešernova 24, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., or one hour before the event; closed Mondays.
Program
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Viennese Neo-Classicism
Svetlana Slapšak
Franc Kavčič (1755–1828)
Invention of Singing and Music Making with Strings, before 1810
Franc Kavčič furnished the Auersperg Palace in Vienna before 1810 with paintings following Gessner's Idylls. The palace was the stage for gatherings of Viennese high society and hosted Gluck and Mozart before the Auerspergs bought the mansion. Kavčič used ancient Greek and Roman sources as well as their contemporary interpretations. Motifs after Gessner embellished Count Cobenzl's mansion in the early 1780s. If he did not paint those canvases, then he certainly used them as a model for the prince's commission.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Adagio and Fugue
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Concerto for Horn No. 1 in D-major
soloist Stefan Dohr
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Musical Joke
soloists Stefan Dohr, Andrej Žust, horn
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
French Baroque
Andrej Smrekar
The Contacts of Slovene and French Painters
The contact of the Slovene territories with French art in the previous centuries was accidental and mediated by imported works of art. However, in the 18th century works by Fortunat Bergant (1721-1769) and Franc Kavčič (1755–1828) lend evidence of productive crosspollination by the great academic tradition evidenced in their respective styles as well as iconographic patterns. During their sojourns in Rome, they occasionally worked with the students of the French Academy.
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764)
Concerto No. 6
Françis Couperin (1668–1733)
Pieces en concert
soloist Andrej Petrač, cello
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687)
Suite Le bourgeois gentilhomme
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
The Czech Masters and a Tribute to Mendelssohn
Damjan Prelovšek
Plečnik and Czech National Architecture
National orientation in the music of Leoš Janáček can be compared to the emphatic effort of Czech artists and architects to forge a nationally distinct expression in the visual arts. However, the president Tomáš Masaryk employed a Slovene architect Jože Plečnik in the creation of the image of the new Czech Republic. The regulation of the Castle of Prague and the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at Královské Vinohrady are among the most esteemed achievements of modern architecture in the Czech Republic.
Jiři Antonín Benda (1722–1795)
Symphony for Strings in B-major
Felix Mendelssohn – Bartholdy (1809–1847)
Concerto for Violin in D-minor
soloist Miran Kolbl, violin
Leoš Janáček (1854–1928)
Suite for Strings
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Georg Friederich Händel (1685–1759)
Ferdinand Šerbelj
Pieter Mulier ml. – Il Tempesta (1637–1701):
Stormy Seas for Mediterranean Patrons
Pieter Mulier Jr. – Il Cavalier Tempesta was a painter of stormy oceans groomed in the family tradition of at least two generations. As a trained painter he took to Italy, worked in Rome, Genoa, Milan and Venice, where he introduced the up till then unknown genre to the South of Europe. The Baroque pathos of his Northern marine motifs interpreted in the Italian manner rhymes well with the opulence of Händel's music of the last veritably universal style, grounded in music as well as in the visual arts.
G. F. Händel: A Selection of Arias and Music for Strings
soloist: Markus Forster, alto
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
An Evening of Slovene Music
Andrej Smrekar
Light as Subject in Slovene Early Modernism
Light is not only one of the principal formal components of any visual creation but it can never be completely divested of its symbolic meanings. At the end of the 19th century light in relation to sight interlaced into complex iconographic statements. With their specifically Viennese themes at root it has inspired Slovene artists during the initial three decades of the 20th century.
Slavko Osterc (1895–1941)
Religioso
Uroš Krek (1922–2008)
On the Way towards Light
soloist Mirjam Kalin, mezzosoprano
Lojze Lebič (1934)
New Composition