Metamorphoses & The Ocean

Nature is changing, accelerated by climate change. If we zoom out millions of years in our minds, this phase is a ripple in eternity. But change is often turbulent and evokes melancholy for what is lost. No one put this into music more poignantly than Richard Strauss in his Metamorphoses. The Festival musicians will perform the beautifully transparent version for string septet. In Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle, a woman bids farewell to her lover in order to merge with eternal nature. Eternity is also the theme of Gija Kancheli’s Time ... and again, an equally moving, if poetic and enigmatic, duo for violin and piano by this Georgian master whose music deserves to be performed more often.

The ocean

The ocean has never been sailed more convincingly in music than in Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan. Ukrainian master pianist Antonii Baryshevksyi, winner of prestigious competitions, combines this enchanting piano piece with two other movements from Ravel’s iconic Miroirs cycle. Whales come to life beneath the reflecting surface of water in George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, a theatrical masterpiece for prepared piano, cello and flute: the musicians appear masked on a stage bathed in blue light. It is also the perfect setting for Blue in blue in blue, the premiere of a piece for seven strings, singing glasses and piano, in which sound magician Maxim Shalygin pays homage to Crumb and plunges us into a hallucinatory new world.