Concert - La Petite sirène

Orchestre de l'Opéra national de Nancy-Lorraine
Music director: Marta Gardolinska
Cello: Xavier Phillips

Wojciech Kilar, Orawa
Antonín Dvorák, Cello Concerto
Alexander von Zemlinsky, Die Seejungfrau

Orawa? This amusing title is the name of the small region between Poland and Slovakia that inspired Wojciech Kilar to write a score in which the orchestra's communicative energy conjures up a range of images and emotions. This folkloric inspiration is a constant for the Polish composer, who has devoted a large part of his career to film music, from Paul Grimault's The King and the Bird to Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and Roman Polanski's The Pianist.

Nearby Bohemia inspired Antonín Dvorák to write the most beautiful melodies for this imposing Cello Concerto, a monument of technical difficulty and Romantic expression in which the soloist struggles against the opulence of the orchestral part. Romanticism again, with the fantasy Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid), in which Alexander von Zemlinsky soothed the pain of a broken love affair through the heroine of Andersen's fairy tale.

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