Programme:
RICHARD WAGNER - Overture to the opera Parsifal
FERENC LISZT - Piano Concerto No.1 in E flat major, S. 124
RICHARD STRAUSS - Symphonic poem "The Hero's Life", op. 40 ("Ein Heldenleben")
"Fantastic" - this is how the musicians of the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra describe the French master of the baton Victorien Vanoosten. The audience, which has already attended several concerts conducted by him at the Philharmonic, echoes them. Vanoosten, who grew up in Lille, studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire, conducting in Paris and Helsinki, and won the ADAMI Conducting Competition in 2016. Vanoosten has been invited to conduct the Paris Chamber Orchestra, Berlin Staatskapelle, Vienna Tonkünstler, Montreal Métropolitain and other orchestras, and his most recent works include productions of Bizet's The Pearl Fisherman, Carmen, Massenet's Les Misérables, and Flotow's Martha, among others, in Toulouse, Berlin, Marseille, Frankfurt. The conductor has been awarded the Order of the French Republic for his services to French culture.
"At the age of 19, Israeli pianist Yoav Levanon is already striking a strikingly mature performance", commented Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the young musician's spectacular performance at the 2022 Europa Open Air concert in Frankfurt in front of 25,000 spectators and almost half a million television viewers. The pianist has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Boulez Hall in Berlin, the Prinzregententheater in Munich, the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Elbe Philharmonic Orchestra in Hamburg, the "Piano Summit" presented by Martha Argerich at Elmau Castle, and he is also recording Liszt's Piano Concertos on Warner Classics. Levanon first appeared on stage at the age of four, won the National Piano Competition in Israel at the age of five, and at the age of six won the gold medal at the International Piano Competition in the USA and performed at Carnegie Hall in New York.
This Vilnius Festival concert programme features three remarkable heroic figures. The first is Parsifal, the saviour of the world, the hero of the eponymous drama-mystery by the last opera reformer Richard Wagner. The overture to this opera could be called a symphonic poem. The First Piano Concerto by the great Romantic composer Ferenc Liszt is often described as a musical novel: the development of the material in this concerto resembles a rhapsodic story: the piano solemnly recites its part as if it were a solid orator, then plunges into the twists and turns of the melodies like a youthful romantic hero, and then explodes into a blazing virtuosity that requires a special technique. Richard Strauss's symphonic poem "The Life of a Hero", unlike his other works in the same genre, has no literary source, which has given rise to all sorts of speculations - who is this hero? The composer once confessed that the epigraph of the work could read as follows: "Through struggle - to perfection of spirit, achieved at the cost of painful losses."
