Program
Gregor Mayrhofer
Insect Concerto
Version for violin solo and orchestra
Benjamin Britten
“Marine Interludes” from the opera “Peter Grimes” for symphony orchestra, Op. 33a
Antonín Dvořák
Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” in E minor, Op. 95
Details
The 34-year-old conductor, composer, and pianist Gregor Mayrhofer, educated in Europe and the United States, is currently pursuing a career in several areas. As a conductor, Mayrhofer is widely sought after by European contemporary music ensembles, including the acclaimed French Ensemble intercontemporain. He was Sir Simon Rattle’s assistant at the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and last season he assisted Teodor Currentzis in his work with the SWR Symphonieorchester.
The concert with the musicAeterna orchestra is Mayrhofer’s first performance in Russia. The evening will open with his opus, Insect Concerto, commissioned in 2019 by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to draw attention to the problem of the rapid extinction of insects. The 10-minute piece is based on the similarities between the sounds of musical instruments and the sounds that insects make.
Gregor Mayrhofer, conductor, composer:
— The Insect Concerto is a composition featuring many different insects (crickets, cicadas, bugs, bees, dragon flys, ants…) as the soloists, taking their rhythms and „melodies“ and transforming them into a new musical universe. The Concerto creates a dialogue between insects and humans, reminding us how important this symbiosis is and lets us discover their infinite variety of sounds.
The first part also includes the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten. The British modernist classic’s opera combines Sunday bell-ringing and pastourelle landscape sketches with violent, stormy blasts full of dark energy.
In the second part, the musicAeterna orchestra, conducted by Gregor Mayrhofer, will perform Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, one of the most popular orchestral compositions in history. It was composed in the USA, where Dvořák was invited as a respected maestro to inspire the emergence of a local national school through his works. The symphony’s repertory life was a happy one: for over one hundred years, this music has been a favourite of audiences in all parts of the world and a mainstay of the international symphonic repertoire.