Archive >> Harmony of the Spheres 2008/2009

Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Viennese Neo-Classicism

  
Svetlana Slapšak
Franc Kavčič (1755–1828)
Svetlana Slapšak talks on the invention of singing and music making with strings, before 1810

Franc Kavcic (1755–1828) furnished the Auersperg Palace in Vienna before 1810 with paintings following Gessner's Idylls. The palace was the stage for gatherings of Viennese high society and hosted Gluck and Mozart before the Auerspergs bought the mansion. Kavcic used ancient Greek and Roman sources as well as their contemporary interpretations. Motifs after Gessner embellished Count Cobenzl's mansion in the early 1780s. If he did not paint those canvases, then he certainly used them as a model for the prince's commission.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Adagio and fugue

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Concerto for Horn No. 1 in D-major
solist Stefan Dohr

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Musical Joke

soloists Stefan Dohr, Andrej Žust, horn


Tuesday, 9 December 2008
French Baroque

 
Andrej Smrekar
Contacts of Slovene and French painters

The contact of the Slovene territories with French art in the previous centuries was accidental and mediated by imported works of art. However, in the 18th century works by Fortunat Bergant (1721-1769) and Franc Kavcic (1755–1828) lend evidence of productive crosspollination by the great academic tradition evidenced in their respective styles as well as iconographic patterns. During their sojourns in Rome, they occasionally worked with the students of the French Academy.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764)
Concerto No. 6

Françis Couperin (1668–1733)
Pieces en concert
soloist Andrej Petrac, cello

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687)
Suite Le bourgeois gentillhomme



Tuesday, 3 February 2009
The Czech Masters and a Tribute to Mendelssohn

 
Damjan Prelovsek
Plecnik and Czech National Architecture

National orientation in the music of Leoš Janácek can be compared to the emphatic effort of Czech artists and architects to forge a nationally distinct expression in the visual arts. However, the president Tomáš Masaryk employed a Slovene architect Jože Plecnik in the creation of the image of the new Czech Republic. The regulation of the Castle of Prague and the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at Královské Vinohrady are among the most esteemed achievements of modern architecture in the Czech Republic.

Jiri Antonín Benda (1722–1795)
Symphony for Strings in B-major

Felix Mendelssohn – Bartholdy (1809–1847)
Concerto for Violin in d-minor,
soloist Miran Kolbl, violin

Leoš Janácek (1854–1928)
Suite for Strings


Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Georg Friederich Händel (1685–1759)

  
Ferdinand Serbelj
Pieter Mulier ml.–Il Tempesta (1637–1701)
Stormy Seas for Mediterranean Patrons

Pieter Mulier Jr. –Il Cavalier Tempesta- was a painter of stormy oceans groomed in the family tradition of at least two generations. As a trained painter he took to Italy, worked in Rome, Genoa, Milan and Venice, where he introduced the up till then unknown genre to the South of Europe. The Baroque pathos of his Northern marine motifs interpreted in the Italian manner rhymes well with the opulence of Händel's music of the last veritably universal style, grounded in music as well as in the visual arts.

selection of arias and music for strings by G. F. Händel.

soloist Markus Forster, kontrus tenorius


Tuesday, 19 May 2009
An Evening of Slovene Music

  
Andrej Smrekar
Light as Subject in Slovene Early Modernism

Light is not only one of the principal formal components of any visual creation but it can never be completely divested of its symbolic meanings. At the end of the 19th century light in relation to sight interlaced into complex iconographic statements. With their specifically Viennese themes at root it has inspired Slovene artists during the initial three decades of the 20th century.
Slavko Osterc (1895–1941)
Religioso

Uroš Krek (1922–2008)
On the Way towards Light
soloist Mirjam Kalin, mezzosoprano

Lojze Lebic (1934)
New composition