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The Golden Flute

Wednesday

16.02.2022

19:30 — Victoria Hall

Series S

Mécène

programme

Jonathan Nott
conductor

Emmanuel Pahud
flute

Jacques Ibert

Concerto for flute and orchestra

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No 5 in C sharp minor


the music

Jacques Ibert's music is largely forgotten today, yet it has many attractions. His expressive and dazzlingly virtuosic Flute Concerto, composed in 1933, has become a masterpiece for soloists around the world. Of its three movements, the third, Allegro scherzando, was chosen as the audition piece for the Paris Conservatoire in the same year as its première. 

Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony is quite a novel. Death was close to Mahler at the time of writting, and he almost died of an intestinal haemorrhage. Therefore interestingly, the work begins with a funeral march. Then the tone gradually changes. At the heart of this particularly brassy work is a sublime adagietto for solo strings and harp, a veritable love poem dedicated to his young wife Alma. In 1970, the cinema did a great service to this page, which recurs like a leitmotif throughout Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti's beautiful film with Dirk Bogarde in the lead role, taking on the physical appearance of the composer. While some music lovers may have been scandalised by this transposition, there is no doubt that this film is a masterpiece and that the death that prowls through this decrepit Venice is very close to the Mahlerian spirit in spite of everything.



the venues

OSR Live

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Maurice Ravel

Valses nobles et sentimentales, pour orchestre

Jonathan Nott

conductor

Recorded on 09 December 2015 at Victoria Hall, Geneva

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Johannes Brahms

Symphony No.3 in F major op. 90

Jonathan Nott

conductor

Recorded on 17 May 2018 at Teatro Colón de Buenos Aires, Cerrito 628