Barber. Mendelssohn. Tchaikovsky

6.00 pm    Welcome drink and a tour of the exhibition 

6.30 pm    Meeting with Stories from the Arts. The curators of the Lobkowicz Collections reveal their treasures

7.00 pm    Concert in the Imperial Hall

8.15 pm    Meeting the musicians over a glass of wine with refreshments prepared by the Chef of the Lobkowicz Palace

The final evening of this series features a very diverse programme, when we will hear works by three composers who wrote music at different periods and in different countries. The Adagio for Strings by the American conductor Samuel Barber became one of the most popular pieces of 20th-century classical music. Another composition purely for strings for this evening will be Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. The four-movement composition was written in 1880. In the first part, Pezzo in forma di Sonata, Tchaikovsky refers to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who he admired unreservedly. Primarily, however, the Serenade is proof of Tchaikovsky’s melodic mastery and shows him as a composer working along the lines of European Romanticism.

Alongside these works for strings, the programme also offers a selection from Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. He himself invited the idea of songs without words and went on to write nearly four dozen of them for the piano. He composed some of the earliest for his sister, Fanny Mendelssohn, while one of the later volumes was dedicated to Clara Schumann. Here we will hear a selection of songs arranged for strings and clarinet: the solo part will be performed by the first clarinettist of the Berlin Philharmonic, Andreas Ottensamer.