Youth Philharmonic of Central Switzerland | Jürg Wyttenbach | Carolin Widmann | Talvi Hunt | Maria Korovatskaya

Lucerne Festival
Lucerne
Switzerland
http://e.lucernefestival.ch

Youth Philharmonic of Central Switzerland | Jürg Wyttenbach conductor | Carolin Widmann violin | Talvi Hunt piano | Maria Korovatskaya soprano

Music as a way of viewing images: in Jürg Wyttenbach’s Violin Concerto from 2013 the instrumentalists seem to have jumped straight out of the screen. And indeed Gustave Courbet’s famous monumental painting A Burial in Ornans will be projected as an enlarged image on the stage. Wyttenbach has translated Courbet’s “rigidified dance of death” into a “masterful piece of music theater,” wrote the Basler Zeitung following the world premiere. His Cortège (“Procession, Funeral March”) is led by the solo violin – played by the wonderful Carolin Widmann – as the ”harlequin of death,” while the other musicians represent the villagers: the bass tuba for example is the heavyset mayor, while the trumpets are two old veterans of the Revolution. A procession also comes to mind in Charles Ives’s Third Symphony, The Camp Meeting, which evokes the eponymous Presbyterian revival meeting with its church hymns, much as the composer experienced them in his childhood.


Jürg Wyttenbach : Divisions for piano and nine solo strings
Modest Mussorgsky : The Nursery
Charles Ives : Symphony No. 3 The Camp Meeting
Jürg Wyttenbach : Cortège pour violon, accompagné de “La Fanfare Harmonie du village”