Susanna Mälkki returns to Montréal to lead the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in three exquisite programs featuring Mozart, Schubert, Holst, and more. The series of concerts traces, through music, humanity’s great adventure from its impetus to conquer to its creative power.
On September 30, the theatrical program begins with Mozart’s famous Concerto for clarinet, undoubtedly one of the Viennese composer’s most expressive instruments, featuring clarinetist Todd Cope. With his Bourgeois gentilhomme, Richard Strauss beckons us several centuries back with an immersion in the French style of Molière and Lully and depicting, through lively and often surprising music, the attempts of a middle-class man to gain the acceptance of the aristocracy.
The second concert will take place on October 1, with a robust program of Takemitsu’s last published work, Air, featuring flutist Timothy Hutchins. Concluding the program is Holst’s great classic of symphonic literature, The Planets. A testament to humanity’s timeless fascination with the spheres, this symphonic epic takes on galactic proportions under the magical baton of Ms. Mälkki.
On October 2, the program combines lyricism and passion with three striking works that chart the human experience of dreams and imagination. From Wagner’s Siegfried-Idyll to Greco-Roman mythology as depicted by Debussy in his Prélude à l’après-midi d’ un faune, this foray into the dreamworld culminates in one of the Romantic repertoire’s masterpieces of sensitivity: Schubert’s famous “Unfinished” Symphony. This performance will also be streamed on Medici.