Berlin Sibelius Orchestra

Cinema for the ears!

Settle into your seat, leave your everyday worries behind, and imagine a crisp bag of popcorn on your lap: The Berlin Sibelius Orchestra’s summer program offers a triptych of the finest cinema for the ears!

It begins with a journey into the magnificent Bohemian forest, lush with greenery and teeming with life. Yet: it is surprisingly shadowy here in the twilight cast by the branches—even menacing. In Leoš Janáček’s opera *The Cunning Little Vixen*, from which the orchestra will perform a suite, foxes, frogs, chickens, birds, and insects sing—more animals than people. The boundaries between them—between hunter and hunted—blur in the process. At times, this fairy-tale play seems quite cheerful; Janáček, a nature lover, clothes it in an extraordinarily colorful, vivid music that, in addition to echoes of Moravian folklore, also ventures into the realms of Debussy’s impressionism. Yet while he himself downplayed the work, remarking that he had written *The Little Fox* “as if the devil were catching flies—when he has nothing better to do,” this music captivates with a smoldering ambiguity: Behind the supposed naivety of the animal tale lies a timelessly melancholic parable about the course of life. It was no coincidence that Janáček stipulated that the opera’s finale be played at his grave.

We encounter another fairy-tale creature in Igor Stravinsky’s ballet suite *The Firebird*. Forget Harry Potter—this magical creature will literally dazzle you with its chromatically iridescent music full of daring orchestral effects! Its adversary is the evil sorcerer Kashchei, who holds a princess captive—a princess who must be rescued. Of course, this task falls to a brave prince. However, he possesses no magical powers whatsoever, so his appearances are accompanied by down-to-earth, folk-inspired sounds. Finally, good and evil stand face to face; Kashchei threatens to defeat the prince—but at the last second, the Firebird appears, like an Orphic phoenix: with his magical music, he first captivates the sorcerer and his demonic retinue in a dizzying dance and then lulls them into a deep sleep. This gives the prince the opportunity to extinguish Kaschtschej’s soul—Good: 1, Evil: 0. Stravinsky grants us a happy ending—and what a magnificent one at that; can we even hear wedding bells ringing? No wonder the composer became famous overnight with *The Firebird*.

Speaking of good and evil, have you ever wondered where exactly the line between E(ntertainment) and E(sthetic) music lies? If you’d asked Nino Rota, he would have simply denied that such a distinction was necessary. In his world, film music was no less serious than music for the concert hall. The Milan-born composer, who was already writing operas and symphonies as a child prodigy, first discovered the music of George Gershwin during his studies in Philadelphia, and then the magic of Hollywood cinema. Among his nearly 150 soundtracks are several for films by the great director Federico Fellini. Fellini would later call Rota “the most valuable partner I’ve ever had.” Why? This becomes immediately clear when listening to the ballet suite for *La Strada*: even those unfamiliar with the story of the girl sold to a cruel circus performer will inevitably see images unfold before their eyes. This music is both artistic and comedic, at times powerful, yet also poetically fragile and imbued with a captivating tragedy, hidden behind the colorful mask. The music even becomes a character in its own right: it is the melody of a toy trumpet that opens up a utopian space for the tormented protagonist—a place where love and humanity exist. Rota masters the tightrope walk between E and U with complete ease; the evocative power of his musical language is astonishing. Or as Fellini put it: “Rota didn’t even need to see the images from my films to instinctively find exactly the right melodies for the scenes I described to him. A dreamer whose deep, inner world reality never penetrated.”

Program

• Leoš Janáček | The Cunning Little Vixen, Suite

• Igor Stravinsky | L’Oiseau de feu (The Firebird), Suite (1919 version)

• Nino Rota | *La strada*, Suite

Berlin Sibelius Orchestra

Conductor: Trân Đình Lam