Concert: Dvorák, Glière, Tchaikovsky

Conductor: Daniel Hogan

Soloist: Oliver Wass

Dvorák: The Noon Witch
Glière: Harp Concerto
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4

For our March concert, we will be under the baton of Daniel Hogan, the second of our two guest conductors this season. Daniel presided over the FSO’s January concerts in 2023 and 2024 and it is a pleasure to welcome him back for a programme of Czech and Russian music. The programme opens with one of Dvorák’s less well-known works, The Noon Witch, a symphonic porem written in 1896 after the composer’s return to his native Bohemia from the United States. The work is based on Karel Erben’s poem, Polednice, which relates the story of the noon demon “Lady Midday” of Slavic mythology.

The FSO is also very excited to welcome Oliver Wass to play the Concerto for Harp and Orchestra by Rheinhold Glière. Oliver studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Imogen Barford and is the only harpist ever to win the Guildhall Gold Medal, the Guildhall’s most prestigious prize, of which Jacqueline du Pré and Bryn Terfel were previous winners. He has performed all the major harp concertos and has won International Competitions in Italy, Hungary and the UK. The Glière concerto combines features that are reminiscent of both the Viennese classical style and Russian romantic nationalism and, although unfamiliar to many, is not to be missed.

The concert concludes with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. Written between 1877 and 1878 at a particularly turbulent time in the composer’s life, the first movement was described by the musicologist Hans Keller as including “one of the most towering symphonic structures in our whole literature”. The haunting opening fanfare, which recurs throughout the work, was described by Tchaikovsky as “the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought of the whole symphony”. Although he describes the first movement as expressing the idea that “all life is an unbroken alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness”, we trust that the concert will enable you to experience ‘visions of happiness’ which do not pass too quickly!