Schedule

Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto leads the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería in a performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’s musical suite The Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux, 1886). This suite consists of 14 movements, each depicting a different animal. The work was published posthumously in 1922, as Saint-Saëns was concerned that his animal miniatures, full of delightful jokes, might damage his reputation as a serious composer. Scored for cello and two pianos, ‘The Swan’ is the only movement that Saint-Saëns allowed to be published during his lifetime. This iconic movement features a beautiful flowing cello melody and gentle piano accompaniment, evoking the image of a swan gliding gracefully over the water. Each movement is introduced by Prieto. This performance was recorded at Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City, in 2021.

The documentary 'Heavenly Voices – The Legacy of Farinelli' (2012) tells us the story of the castrato in music – male singers who were castrated at a young age in order to preserve their high vocal range, a cruel practice that was in place mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries. For two centuries, castrati's performances held European audiences spellbound, with successful castrati such as Farinelli ranking among the most influential and highest-earning musicians of those days. Today, roles originally written for castrati are often performed by countertenors. In this documentary, countertenors Max Emanuel Cenčić, Philippe Jaroussky, Andreas Scholl, Franco Fagioli, and Jochen Kowalski discuss Baroque-era operatic entertainment. 'Heavenly Voices' is a film by Gino Pennacchi (writer) and Alessandro Scillitani (director).

Les Dissonances is a collective of artists founded by violinist David Grimal in 2004. The conductorless ensemble consists of musicians from the most prestigious European orchestras, international soloists, and young talents. In this performance, Les Dissonances’ string quartet – consisting of David Grimal (violin), Hans Peter Hofmann (violin), David Gaillard (viola), and Xavier Phillips (cello) – performs Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 in G major, D. 887, Op. 161. Schubert composed this work, his final string quartet, in a mere ten days in June 1826. However, this highly original piece, characterized by its restless shifts between major and minor, was not published until after Schubert’s death in 1851. This performance was recorded at Cité de la Musique in Paris, France, in 2014.

Quarteto Radamés Gnattali performs Heitor Villa-Lobos's String Quartet No. 17 at the Palácio das Laranjeiras in Rio de Janiero, Brasil. The ensemble was founded in 2006 and consists of Carla Rincón and Francisco Roa (violins), Fernando Thebaldi (viola), and Hugo Pilger (cello). The quartet, which specializes in Brazilian music, focuses on educational activities. Their recording of all of Villa-Lobos string quartets is a major achievement and was very well received by international music critics. Except for his Bachianas brasileiras, the performance of many of the Brazilian's compositions is limited to Latin America. Highly regarded as a composer, conductor and educator in his native country, Villa-Lobos has operas, symphonies, concertos, piano repertoire, choral music, and seventeen string quartets to his credit.

Conductor Mariss Jansons, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition” were predestined to come together. The lavish colors of Ravel's orchestration of the Russian work, the breathtaking inventiveness of the wildly different movements that are all interconnected through a recurring “Promenade” – few conductors are as adept as Jansons to savor all the richness and colorfulness of the paintings and sketches by Victor Hartmann. Today, the work is universally celebrated in its dazzling orchestral transcription by Maurice Ravel. It was the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky who commissioned the orchestration by Ravel in 1922. Recorded at Herkulessaal, Munich in 2014.

Marin Alsop conducts the Britten-Pears Orchestra in a performance of Maurice Ravel’s ‘Ma mère l'Oye’ (Mother Goose). This performance took place at Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape Bridge in the UK in 2017. This five-part orchestral suite was originally as a piano duet in 1910, but the composer orchestrated the work the year after. Ravel originally composed the work as a piano duet for the two children of Polish sculptor Gobeski and dedicated the work for four hands to the children.

Soprano Anabel de la Mora is accompanied by the Orquesta Sinfonica de Minería conducted by Raúl Delgado in a concert program dedicated to Mexican composers. This program, which includes the first part of the concert, features the following works: Miguel Bernal Jiménez's "Angelus", Alfonso Esparza's "Dime que sí", María Grever's "Munequita Lina", Ricardo Castro's "Intermezzo de Atzimba", Jorge del Moral's "Besos robados", and Consuelo Velázquez's "Bésame mucho". This concert was recorded at the Academia de Música del Palacio de Minería in Mexico City in 2019.

A hundred years of Neapolitan music for violin consort and basso continuo: this is the tasty menu Enrico Gatti and his Ensemble Aurora have prepared for your listening pleasure. The flourishing musical life of Naples around 1700 was the breeding ground for many styles and genres. Ensemble Aurora explores the terrain between the church sonatas of Marchitelli, toccatas by Supriani, and the late chamber concertos by Fiorenza and Leo.

French composer Guillaume Connesson (*1970) is building an impressive musical oeuvre, to which he has recently added an opera: 'Les bains macabres'. For this romantic contemporary thriller opera he worked closely with librettist Olivier Bleys (*1970), a successful French author with dozens of novels to his credit. The result is an enigmatic narrative with a film noir soundtrack about the macabre 'Bains Terminus': ailing patrons who come to take the waters here never leave. When the Pool police investigates their mysterious deaths, the realms of life and death turn out to be not as separate as expected... In this February 2020 production, directed by Florent Siaud, soprano Sandrine Buendia plays the part of Célia and baritone Romain Dayez plays Mathéo. Conductor Arie van Beek conducts the Orchestre des Frivolités Parisiennes.

Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 9 can be seen as a farewell to life. Even as Bruckner began working on it in 1887, his health had begun to fail. He expressed the hope that "God will grant me enough time to complete it," and worked on it assiduously over the next years. But by late 1894 he had completed only the first three movements. When he died on 11 October 1896, he left six different versions of the finale, all of them incomplete. Despite its incompleteness, the work is monumental and evokes the grandeur of a majestic cathedral. The details of this architectural colossus are worked out with astonishing transparency by Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra. The orchestra’s powerfully contoured and sharply profiled interpretation was recorded live in late October 2007 at the magnificent "Golden Hall" of Vienna's fabled Musikverein where the work was given its premiere.

Jeditah is an experimental songwriter, producer and singer from Amsterdam. She works with Brendan Jan Walsh on cello and Jordy Pama on synths and electronics. From an early age on, Jeditah has been immersed in the world of music, travelling with her parents as a music collective. She finds inspiration in the works of acclaimed artists like Björk, James Blake, Laurie Anderson and PJ Harvey. When she began experimenting with making her own music, she first only utilized her own voice, lowering and altering it, and eventually adding electronic beats and synths. With Electric AlleyCat, Jeditah has established her position as a singer and songwriter. In between performing and recording with the band, she creates layered soundscapes from old recordings and homemade samples. It's here where she develops her very own sound: playful, melancholic and adventurous – music that speaks to the imagination of the listener. In this concert from 2019's Classical:NEXT!, she performs "Horseman" "You & Me, "Lay Down", "The Night", "Differently" and "Private Space".

“The Unanswered Ives” is the first documentary about American modernist composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). Ives was among the first generation of American composers that achieved international acclaim. Born in 1874, in Danbury, Connecticut, Ives took music lessons at a young age, becoming a church organist at the age of 14. Following his graduation from the music department at Yale University, the young composer decided to pursue a career outside of the arts. He started working in insurance, co-founding an innovative and highly successful insurance company. It was in his spare time that Ives composed his ambitious music, in which he experimented with advanced features including polytonality, twelve-tone technique, and quarter tones. The documentary film “The Unanswered Ives” (2018) sheds light on Ives’s life and work in all its facets, exploring his aural world by showing music performances in churches, concert halls, open-air venues, and a circus tent. Using interviews with relatives, insurance brokers, musicologists, and musicians, documentary filmmaker Anne-Kathrin Peitz explores the question “who was Charles Ives?"

The Casco Phil, The Chamber Music Orchestra of Belgium, conducted by Benjamin Haemhouts, performs Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a. The work is a transcription by Rudolf Barshai of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, which was composed in only three days (July 12 to 14 1960). The work draws from Shostakovich’s pieces, like the Symphonies No. 1 and 5, and a Jewish theme from Piano Trio No. 2. Furthermore, it contains melodies from the first Cello Concerto and the Lady MacBeth opera. Recorded at the Elisabeth Center in Antwerp, Belgium.

French conductor Adrien Perruchon and the Flanders Symphony Orchestra take us on a musical journey to Mexico with this performance of Aaron Copland’s El Salón México (1936). Inspired by a visit to the colorful night club of the same name in Mexico City, Copland composed the vibrant orchestral work, incorporating Mexican folk tunes. This performance was recorded at Concertgebouw Brugge in Belgium, on March 1, 2017.

Mexican conductor José Areán leads the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería in a performance of Gustav Mahler’s song cycle ‘Songs of a Wayfarer’ (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen). Baritone Jorge Lagunes is the soloist. Written in 1884-1885, the work consists of four songs, each based on one of the composer’s own poems, detailing a young man's unfortunate love and resulting journey through the world. Mahler uses the orchestra not just for accompaniment but to create a rich, immersive emotional landscape, with musical phrases that build and recede with great power and transparency. This performance was recorded at Sala Nezahualcóyotl of the Centro Cultural Universitario in Mexico City, in 2012.

Sergei Prokofiev based his ballet ‘Romeo and Juliet’ on William Shakespeare's famous play of the same name, telling the story of two young lovers from the feuding families Montague and Capulet. Acclaimed French choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot created a distinctive choreography of the ballet in 1996, which has been performed to great success the world over. In his production, Maillot interprets Romeo and Juliet not as a social conflict or clan warfare governed by a strict code of honor, but as a tale of accidental tragedy that leads to the death of children more concerned with the path of love than that of hatred. This 2002 interpretation is performed by the dancers of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo. Chris Roelandt and Bernice Coppieters star in the title roles.

At the behest of Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich, several classical music stars took part in this concert in aid of the Erasmus Fund for medical research in intensive care, recorded at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, Belgium, on October 21, 2023. The concert pays tribute to the renowned cellist Aleksandr Khramouchin (1979) who suddenly passed away on May 13, 2023. As part of this concert, pianist Martha Argerich, violinists Tedi Papavrami and Yossif Ivanov, violist Lyda Chen-Argerich, and cellist Jing Zhao perform Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44.