Stravinskij / HaydnStravinsky / Haydn

More than 100 years have passed since the Paris premiere of the ballet Pulcinella, for which Pablo Picasso himself designed the costumes. With Pulcinella, Igor Stravinsky began an era of his looking back to the musical past, and thus his neoclassical period. Stravinsky’s view of Classical music will be countered by the works of Joseph Haydn. A central figure in the musical life of the 18th-century Austrian royal courts, whose history and development of musical forms owes much to his innovations, the familiarly named “Papa” Haydn was a hard-working misfit. The refined playing of his colleague Anton Weidinger, as well as the development of the trumpet's valve system, prompted the composer to create a solo concerto. The premiere of the concerto may well have come as a shock to the audience, as trumpets of the time could not play scales and everyone was used to their limited ten-note range.

Classical repertoire is no stranger to conductor Gérard Korsten, having held the post of violinist and assistant at the Camerata Salzburg for several years, and he was also concertmaster of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe for nine years. The young Slovak-born Stanislav Masaryk has been the principal trumpet player in the Czech Philharmonic since 2020, and fortunately he can often be seen on our stage as a soloist.