Friday, 18 June 2021, at 9.30 pm, Via Rocca Brancaleone, Ravenna

Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra
Charles Dutoit — conductor
Nelson Goerner — piano

Igor Stravinsky: Jeu de cartes. Ballet en trois donnes
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23
Igor Stravinsky: L’oiseau de feu. Second suite (1919)

Tchaikovsky had to travel to America for the première of his concert masterpiece. The “unplayable” quality of his Piano Concerto no.1 (and of his later Violin Concerto), in fact, conceals the very innovations that will make this work—with its “outrageous” opening chords so far removed from the sensibility of 1875—the emblem of late Romantic concert music. Instead, when The Firebird was premiered in 1910, three years before the huge success of The Rite of Spring, Diaghilev’s comment on Stravinsky was: “Mark him well, he is a man on the eve of celebrity.” And indeed, he was right: twenty-six years later, Stravinsky’s language was so sophisticated that he was able to score and stage a game of poker with the devil disguised as the mischievous Joker.