Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra's Festival Highlighting Six Russian Composers

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra's three-week festival celebrates Russian composers January 11-27, 2007. Influenced by the social and political issues of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russian Festival composers expressed an array of emotion in their music - from nationalism to contempt. The works of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev are legendary and prolific for artistic quality, depth, emotion, and historical significance.

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra's Russian Festival will feature Music Director Andreas Delfs, and guest conductors Miguel Harth-Bedoya and Rossen Milanov. The Festival will also feature violinist Sarah Chang and pianist Adam Golka.

Stravinsky's Petrouchka sets the festival in motion depicting an 1830s Russian fair. Petrouchka is a doll, a puppet-like man, and is portrayed as the helpless victim of a brutality he cannot combat. The music tells the story of Petrouchka's emotional struggles. The original score was first performed by the Russian Ballet at Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet in 1911. Tchaikovsky's popular and patriotic Symphony No. 5 is also part of the Festival's opening weekend and is thought to be a product of creative rebirth for Tchaikovsky. Often considered the greatest nineteenth century Russian talent, Tchaikovsky was known for his ballets including The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, as well as his up-beat and nationalistic approach to composition. Music Director Andreas Delfs will lead the weekend's performances January 11-13.

The Festival's second weekend welcomes returning guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya along with pianist Adam Golka performing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3. Introduced as a new work during Rachmaninoff's first American tour in 1909, it is considered to be the most difficult concerto in the entire piano repertoire. Prokofiev's Cinderella Ballet excerpts will also be featured on the Festival's second weekend. Written in Russia during World War II, the ballet is representative of many Soviet productions of the time featuring escapist fantasies and fairy tales. The piece highlights three themes of Cinderella's life; the mistreated Cinderella, the Cinderella of purity and daydreams, and Cinderella happy and in love.

Bringing the Russian Festival to a stunning close, violinist Sarah Chang will perform the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1. Guest conductor Rossen Milanov will lead the weekends' performances January 26-27. Dmitri Shostakovich's work may be considered the most controversial of Russian composers, due to the composer's complex relationship with the Russian government during the reign of Stalin in the 1930s.

Condemned and banned from public performance, Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 was said to be influenced by Jewish folk music capturing the solitude of the then prominent Soviet anti-Semitism. Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade is the symphonic suite based on the tales of the "Thousand and One Nights," a collection of ancient Persian-Indian-Arabian tales published in the mid-15th-century. The music depicts the story of the Sultan who, persuaded by the falseness and faithlessness of women, has sworn to put to death each one of his wives until he meets Scheherazade - who so entrances him with her stories that he keeps her alive for one thousand and one nights.

By www.milwaukeesymphony.org