MAURICE RAVEL – La Valse, choreographic poem for large orchestra; song cycle for soprano and orchestra Shéhérazade
HECTOR BERLIOZ – Symphonie fantastique in C major, Op. 14
“She is not a star. She is a shining diamond that you can enjoy up close”, said Jürgen Flimm, former artistic director of the Salzburg Festival and director of the Berlin State Opera, in an interview for Austrian TV ORF in August 2018, sharing his impressions of the premiere of Didone abbandonata (Dido Abandoned) at the Innsbruck Early Music Festival. Flimm said this about Viktorija Miškūnaitė, Lithuanian opera soloist, prima donna of the LNOBT, audience favourite, winner of many national and international competitions. Tonight, she joins the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra and the French conductor Cyril Diederich in Maurice Ravel’s sophisticated and colourful song cycle Scheherazade. Born into a family of musicians, the French Maestro has lived surrounded by music since childhood and, as he himself recalls, he never missed a summer concert of the recently established Aix-en-Provence Festival.
Cyril Diederich, who is well known to the Lithuanian audience, has often performed with various ensembles: he has conducted Halévy’s opera La Juive (The Jewess) at the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre, and in the autumn 2015 he conducted a production of Massenet’s Manon. He has been invited to conduct LNSO and appear at the Vilnius Festival. Tonight, the Maestro and the orchestra enrich the programme of French music with two colourful symphonic canvases – Ravel’s dramatic choreographic poem for orchestra La Valse (Waltz) and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which could be rightly described as a psychological poem inspired by the composer’s passionate love for Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
