Tchaikovsky / Ginastera / Márquez / Moncayo
With a thoughtfully put together programme, Tchaikovsky / Ginastera / Márquez / Moncayo is a concert at Teatro Filarmonico in Verona at which the renowned Mexican maestro, Carlos Miguel Prieto, takes charge. Augustin Hadelich is scheduled to act in the role of violin soloist, an Italian-German-American musician who won the Best Classical Instrumental Solo at the 58th Grammy awards in 2016.
The programme opens with one of the most-loved violin concertos in the modern classical repertoire, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op.35, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It debuted 4 December 1881 in Vienna. Tchaikovsky began work on it while recuperating at the Swiss resort of Clarens following his less-than-successful marriage to Antonina Miliukova, which had, by then, fallen apart. The boldness of the composer's creative imagination is on show in the concerto. Although the piece is well organised and structured in a clear way, it allows plenty of room for expressiveness, not least from the soloist.
The concert continues with music written by Alberto Ginastera, an Argentinian composer born in 1916. Four Dances from Estancia, Opus 8A, is the chosen piece which was composed just three years after Ginastera graduated. The balletic composition focuses on gauchos, Argentine cowboys, and the term estancia simply refers to a cattle ranch. The Four Dances extract from the ballet was first performed in 1943 at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. However, the ballet would not be staged until 1952, almost a decade later.
Arturo Márquez's Danzón no. 2 is the next part of the concert's programme. Mexican by birth, Márquez spent much of his early life in California. He would later study music in Mexico and France. Danzón No. 2 is the most well-known and popular composition of the composer's career to date. With a varying tempo and modern dance style, the piece premiered in Mexico City in 1994, performed by the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM.
The programme concludes with Huapango by José Pablo Moncayo, a Mexican pianist and composer who was born in 1912. This premiere of the piece, a rhapsody for orchestra, took place in August 1941 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. It had been commissioned as a piece that would be based on the popular music of the Veracruz area of Mexico. Three songs were chosen to serve as inspiration for the orchestral work, each underpinned by a distinctive huapango rhythm.
Carlos Miguel Prieto, a former double Latin Grammy winner who took the Best Classical Album award in 2016 among other prizes, has served as the Music Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México for well over a decade. The concert Tchaikovsky / Ginastera / Márquez / Moncayo constitutes a superb opportunity to see the maestro in action, conducting with all the charisma and expressive musical interpretations he is known for.