This year, Dmitrij Kitajenko is scheduled to conduct three Christmas concerts at the Kulturpalast in Dresden. It is a festive program with works by Russian composers. In the Russian music fairy-tales have an important place. This is applies to old legends like the The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh as well as to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.
Dmitrij Kitajenko begins the program of the Dresden Christmas Concerts 2018 with Rimsky-Korsakov’s colourful Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, a work he extensively promoted this year, and he ends the concert with extracts from Tchaikovsky’s wonderful Nutcracker ballet.
In between the audience will experience Sergei Prokofiev’s impetuous Second Piano Concerto which was first performed in 1913. The work was not well judged neither by the music critics nor by the majority of the public. During the First World War the score got lost, and Prokofiev had to produce a new orchestration. The concert unites a late-romantic with a more modern style and shows already the unmistakable personnel style of the composer. The Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son is the soloist in this concert with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra.