Page 319 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

20 September 2022
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

Orchestra Season Opening Concert –

Liverpool Philharmonic Hall

Domingo Hindoyan’s second season as Chief Conductor started in fine style with a programme
of Central European masterpieces, with Janáček’s mighty orchestral Sinfonietta paired with
Mahler’s heavenly song-symphony to herald – with trumpets and sleighbells respectively – the
musical delights to come, including the Liverpool debut of the brilliant Czech soprano, Kateřina
Kněžíková.

Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) composed his Sinfonietta in 1926 with its first performance on 26th
June of that year in Prague. A passionate and deeply patriotic Czech, he was thrilled when his
homeland achieved independence at the end of World War I and dedicated the piece to the new
Czech Army in celebration of ‘contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength,
courage, and determination to fight for victory.’

All five movements have subtitles that relate to his hometown of Brno, although his description of
it at the time as ‘a nice little Sinfonietta with fanfares’ seems to have been a kind of joke as it
certainly isn’t little and it’s a whole lot more than just ‘nice’: just imagine a giant orchestra and a
row of nine trumpeters as well as bass trumpets and tenor tubas all blazing away and that’s just
the start of it!

Janáček reportedly said that ‘music isn’t about notes, it’s about life, blood and nature’, and
although the opening trumpet fanfare was a little wavy to begin with, we were ultimately served
up a full gamut of emotions from its quietest, tenderest moments to the colossal, massed song of
its final pages. This is a piece rich in drama and intensity and the orchestra and accompanying
Banda triumphed in the telling.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) composed his Symphony No 4 in 1899-1900, with its first
performance in Munich on 25th November 1901. Considered his sunniest, least complicated, and
generally most accessible symphony, it is also his shortest, which helped it gain popularity with
the relative smallness of its orchestra making it an easier production to stage.

With a somewhat lively, youthful, and humorous tone at its start, there are darker melancholic
undertones that dance in and out the piece as we flitter between moments of joy before
temporarily descending to hints of deeper despair, best reflected in the ghost-like solo violin of
the second movement.