NOSPR / Lawrence Foster / Ning Feng - NOSPR

Today, Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is the most frequently played comic opera, but the premiere, in 1816, was a complete flop. The overture presents the most important features of the Italian composer’s music: lightness, tuneful themes and that famous crescendo.Niccolò Paganini, ten years Rossini’s senior, was remembered as a devilish violin virtuoso. Worth noting in his fiendishly difficult First Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 6 is the military character and the use of janissary percussion.
From Italy, we move to South America. Atacama, by the Chilean composerMarco-Antonio Pérez-Ramirez, is a remarkable virtuoso concerto dedicated to the memory of Iannis Xenakis. The evening will be completed by Igor Stravinsky’s ballet music Jeu de cartes (‘Game of cards’). This neoclassical work is larded with quotations from masterworks of the past, including – and here we come full circle – the overture to The Barber of Seville.

[Bartosz Witkowski, translated by John Comber]

Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 115 minutes