Symphonie Fantastique, Brahms, and Mendelssohn

Currently chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Domingo Hindoyan began his music studies in Venezuela’s El Sistema. He comes to Kansas City with a wealth of experience conducting orchestras and operas around the world.  He’ll lead your Kansas City Symphony and Chorus in a program filled with drama and fantasy.

Taking just three days, Mendelssohn composed his Overture to Ruy Blas as incidental music for a production of Victor Hugo’s play. Noble brass chorales frame nimble string passages with lively woodwind punctuation. Striking texture changes are at the forefront of this appealing overture.

Nänie is Johannes Brahms’ gentle lament for his friend, painter Anselm Feuerbach. Plaintive yet pastoral, Brahms’ nostalgic setting of Friedrich Schiller’s poem is anything but gloomy, focusing instead on the transient beauty of life.  Written a decade earlier, Schicksalslied is Brahms’ rumination on a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin contrasting the idyllic existence led by mythical Greek gods with the restless and doomed fate of humans.  Brahms skillfully transmutes this dark ending into an ethereal conclusion, making one feel hopeful about human destiny.

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is, well, fantastic in every sense.  Add this one to your bucket list for its stunning orchestrations, eerie harmonies, and totally wild storyline.  Radical, edgy, forlorn, grotesque, peaceful, bold — Symphonie fantastique has it all.