The Reina Sofía School of Music will open the 2024/2025 academic year with a concert by the Freixenet Symphony Orchestra at the National Music Auditorium on October 3 at 7:30 p.m.
The programme includes works by Beethoven, Alban Berg and Tchaikovsky, performed by the School’s Freixenet Symphony Orchestra under the direction of maestro Nicolás Pasquet and violinist Donghyun Kim as soloist.
Specifically, as the Reina Sofía School of Music points out, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Op. 84, “constructs a narrative that evolves from suffering and captivity, represented in the opening ominous chords written for strings, to the celebration of freedom in the coda, a tumultuous fragment of brass fanfares and accelerated turns.”
For its part, the Concerto for violin and orchestra ‘In memory of an angel’, by Berg, (with the solo violin by Donghyun Kim, a student of the Telefónica Violin Chair with professor Christoph Poppen), is a work linked to the tragic death of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius’ daughter, Manon, due to poliomyelitis.
Berg, a member of the Second Viennese School, loved Manon like a daughter, and the shock of her death prompted him to compose the concerto, which had been previously commissioned by the American violinist Louis Krasner. The year was 1935, a time of great economic and personal difficulties for the twelve-tone composer, who was pushed aside by Nazism, which labelled his music as “degenerate”, according to the School.
Finally, they will perform Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36, which was born from the author’s negative experiences and thoughts after his marriage in 1877 to Antonina Miliukova and their early separation.
The Fourth Symphony was financed by the patron Nadezka von Meck, to whom the work is dedicated. The composer wrote to her, indicating the expressive keys of the work: “The introduction constitutes the germ of the symphony, the idea on which everything else depends, the Destiny, unattainable, inescapable.”