Eastern Odyssey

The evening

The overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni effortlessly introduces the shifting moods and dramatic contrasts and tensions that are to follow. Its genius lies in the success with which it captures the spirit of the opera without quoting from all its famous numbers. Saint-Saëns’ exquisite Second Piano Concerto shows a youthful high-spiritedness and somewhat inorganic, juxtaposed themes and movements. A famous witticism claimed, “It begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach”. The skill of Saint-Saëns the pianist shines throughout, with its virtuosic passages and arpeggios, ultimately sparking to the finale’s tempestuous pyrotechnics. Scheherazade consisted of “separate, unconnected episodes and pictures” as Rimsky-Korsakov himself put it, from The Arabian Nights. It is a triumph of imagination over experience; a feast of sumptuous colours and brilliant instrumental effect by the man who literally wrote the book on orchestration. The suite is bound together by a recurring motif, a bewitching melody sung by the solo violin: the voice of Scheherazade herself. It quickly became a favourite Romantic showpiece and a landmark in the history of descriptive music.