NOSPR / Lawrence Foster / Carolin Widmann - NOSPR

In the music of the old masters, Jörg Widmann finds cracks and fissures, acrid dissonances and unresolved tensions, which enable us to listen to it with an excitement akin to a confrontation with the newest music. His Violin Concerto contains echoes of the lyricism of Mahler and Berg, which are juxtaposed with Ravel’s Violin Sonata, infused with the sensuousness of jazz, in an arrangement by Yan Maresz, a composer with Polish roots associated with the IRCAM centre for avant-garde music in Paris. The works scored for violin and orchestra will be counterpointed by Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony, known as his third, although the fifth one that he wrote. This work only received its ultimate form in 1842, although the first bars were sketched more than a decade earlier, after the composer’s visit to Holyrood Abbey and Palace in Edinburgh, the overgrown ruins and bloody history of which left a lasting impression on him.

Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 110 minutes