The 71^th season of Philharmonic events concludes on 12 May at 7 PM with an impressive evening of symphonic music. Led by maestro Juozas Domarkas, the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra will play “An Alpine Symphony” by Richard Strauss, and with the Rio de Janeiro born temperamental pianist and initiator of “Música Romântica” music festival in Switzerland Eliane Rodrigues, will perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

An Alpine Symphony, which composer Richard Strauss wrote already being famous as a creator of symphonic poems, is an expressive and enchanting composition. The author considered it to be perhaps his most prominent artistic achievement and was very proud of it. The symphony can be described as a sonic painting of the Alps, about an hour long unforgettable musical tour of mountains, their tracks, gorges and deep green eye-piercing forests, all which the composer had experienced and admired in his childhood.

According to maestro J. Domarkas, R. Strauss' Alpine Symphony is an extremely difficult composition, showing maturity and mastery of an orchestra. Symphony orchestration is impressive (nearly 120 instruments!) and has very refined, rare timbres of instruments. For example, the score includes bass oboe, a thunder machine designed to imitate the sound of thunder, a wind machine which has not been widely used throughout the history of music; and other special effects-generating mechanisms. All this is included in 22 sections of An Alpine Symphony performed as one continuous movement; it describes a one-day Alpine journey in chronological order. With sounds of music like in an attractive drama, Strauss recreates mysterious images of the shadows of the night, thrilling sunrise and noises of awakening nature, pastoral moods and romance of forests and of mountain streams, impressions of glittering glaciers and threatening tempest.

To the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, which last summer visited the “Música Romântica” festival in the Swiss Alps, the visual impressions of Alpine mountains and the experiences are still fresh, so they will have something to tell the audience setting out on a musical tour of the Alps. At the piano we will see the originator of this festival, pianist Eliane Rodrigues. She was known as a real wunderkind – she played her first recital at the age of 5, and had first TV performance at the age 6 with the Brazilian Orquestra Sinfonica Nacional. Today, the tour list of E. Rodrigues covers more than 25 countries around the world, and the repertoire includes over 60 piano concertos. On the stage of the Lithuanian National Philharmonic, the Brazilian pianist will perform the spectacular S. Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which presents complex technical challenges even for the most experienced pianists.

LNF info.