Programme:
Dominykas Digimas - "De Focus"
Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 73
Hector Berlioz - "Symphonie fantastique"
The world's brightest star, the talented pianist Dmitrijus Levkovičius returns to the stage of the Kaunas State Philharmonic together with the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the Chief Conductor of the National Opera and Ballet Theatre of Lithuania Ričardas Šumila.
Canadian-born, Ukrainian-born Levkovich was born with two vocations: pianist and composer. His performances have been praised for his "extraordinary artistic sophistication" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and his "musical understanding far ahead of most of his peers" (American Record Guide), while his original compositions have been praised by Philadelphia's Broad Street Review for their "heartfelt melodies" and "huge emotional waves". The pianist has performed in concert halls around the world, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Paris' Champs Elysees, and New York's Carnegie Hall.
On 21 November, audiences will have the opportunity to hear Levkovičius and the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra perform the Fifth Piano Concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), a work known for its grandeur, bright melodies and heroic spirit.
In the second part of the concert, the orchestra will perform one of the most famous works by the great French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), the Symphonie Fantastique, which is fully titled Symphonie Fantastique: An Episode in the Life of an Artist. The symphony is one of the first works of programmatic music, and is also notable for its innovative, even revolutionary ideé fixe theme for the time: it depicts Berlioz's own hallucinatory fantasies, which obsessed him as a result of his unhappy love for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. However, after the symphony's premiere, the composer's seven years of suffering came to an end: impressed by Berlioz's fame (the premiere was attended by the likes of Ferenc Liszt, Frederic Chopin, Niccolò Paganini, and the writers Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and George Sand), Mrs Smithson agreed to marry the composer. The symphony, premiered in Paris in 1830, earned Berlioz a reputation as one of the most progressive composers of the century.
The concert will also feature the composition De Focus by Dominykas Digimas, the youngest of the Lithuanian generation of composers.
