February sees Maestro Dimitri Kitaenko again at the helm of the Qatar Philharmonic, whose conductor of honor he is. Two concerts are scheduled at the opera house of Doha. On February 10 he conducts a mixed program with Paul Dukas’s tone poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, subtitled Scherzo after a Ballad by Goethe. The German pianist Christopher Park is the soloist in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 K. 595. Park is a prize-winner of the famous Leonard Bernstein Award, and in the season 2016/2017,he was Rising Star of the European Concert House Organization (ECHO).
Finally, Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is played in Maurice Ravel’s brilliant orchestration, which the French composer created in 1922 at the demand of conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky led the first performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it became a triumphant success. Ravels version strongly underlines the mood of each piece and shows a lot of characteristic details from the pictures.
One week later, on February 17, Dimitri Kitaenko is set to conduct the second concert with the Qatar Philharmonic. The famous cellist Daniel Mueller-Schott is the soloist in Antonin Dvorák’s Cello Concerto op. 104, which, although written in the US, hardly shows an American influence. The music provides rather a feeling of homesickness, but lives also from the energy which Dvorák always scooped from his national roots.
The concert will end with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony in which the composer processed his own bitter experiences from the Stalin era in an atmosphere of oppression and threat, but also aggression and sarcasm. Beyond, the symphony is another prove of Shostakovich’s unique art of orchestration.