- Noah Bendix-Balgley will play Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 tomorrow, Friday.
- The American violinist makes his debut at the Palau de la Música and is the concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker.
- Under the baton of Alexander Liebreich, Zemlinsky’s ‘Lyric Symphony’ will also be performed, bringing together soprano Sarah Wegener and baritone Christian Immler.
Thursday, January 9th. The winter season kicks off and the first concert of 2025 will be tomorrow, Friday, featuring the Orquesta de València and its conductor, Alexander Liebreich. With the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, Noah Bendix-Balgley, who makes his debut at the Palau de la Música, they will perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s poetic Violin Concerto No. 4 in the Sala Iturbi at 19.30 hours.
The Director of the Palau, Vicente Llimerá, has emphasised that the Orquesta de València and Maestro Liebreich ‘open this year’s subscription, which we have just opened, and in which we have placed our best wishes to share the best symphonic music with our public’. Llimerá recalled that Bendix-Balgley has won prestigious competitions such as the Long-Thibaud and the Queen Elisabeth and that he plays a 1732 violin from the Cremonese workshop of Carlo Bergonzi. He also stressed that ‘we always want to include in our subscription the great international concert artists who have never visited the Palau, and on this occasion we will enjoy the excellent artistic quality and superb technique of a musician who leads the strings of what is considered to be the best orchestra in the world’.
The second part of the programme will feature Zemlinsky’s ‘Lyric Symphony’, which will be performed by soprano Sarah Wegener, also making her debut at the Palau, and baritone Christian Immler, and which constitutes the zenith of the romantic style of a composer greatly influenced by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg.
Zemlinsky was Arnold Schönberg’s teacher in the latter’s early years of apprenticeship. Schönberg, who was largely self-taught, received from Zemlinsky a solid grounding in counterpoint and traditional harmony, an influence that was evident in Schönberg’s early works, which were imbued with the late Romantic idiom that also characterised Zemlinsky.
While Zemlinsky remained faithful to the tonal language, despite experimenting with forms and textures, Schönberg broke with the tonal tradition and developed atonality and later the dodecaphonic system. Zemlinsky, composer, conductor and pedagogue, is a composer closely linked to the career and origins of the master Liebreich, and is a figure linked to the great names of Viennese music of the early 20th century. His sister Mathilde was the wife of Arnold Schönberg.
The composer had a frustrating relationship with Alma Schindler, who soon after the break-up married Gustav Mahler. And it is precisely the Mahlerian ‘Song of the Earth’ that impressed Zemlinsky so vividly that his ‘Lyric Symphony’ is the direct consequence of such admiration. Composed between 1922 and 1923, soprano and baritone sing texts taken from the poetry of the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, accompanied by a large orchestra and with the same lyrical ambition and vocation as their Mahlerian reference.