São Paulo Symphony Orchestra

Sounds of nature meet the noise of the big city: in  “Central Park in the Dark” (1906), Charles Ives wanted to create a “picture in sounds of the sounds of nature that one would hear some thirty years ago […] when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night” – including a ragtime battle between two pianolas from a neighbouring apartment block and a band wandering through the setting. Three decades later, Brazil would also experience its first wave of urbanisation. A soundtrack for this is provided by Heitor Villa-Lobos’s scintillating symphonic poem “Uirapurú”, in which he completed his shift to a national music style inspired by folk music together with the sagas and legends of his homeland. It is notable for its comprehensive and unusual instrumentation including a violinophone, a violin with a metal horn, and a broad arsenal of South American percussion instruments. In addition to these two works, the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and Principal Conductor Thierry Fischer have also programmed Alberto Ginastera’s uncompromisingly modern, multi-coloured and multi-faceted Violin Concerto. The solo part – not only in the finale’s wild perpetuum mobile – is riddled with such technical devilry that a spectacular listening adventure is guaranteed from multiple Grammy-winner  Hilary Hahn, who is capable of accomplishing such high wire acts with apparent ease. The final piece is an iconic work of new music that also offers a thematic introduction to this edition of the festival: Edgard Varèse’s “Amériques” finds musical forms for the utopias of vast space, imagination, expeditions, urbanisation, industrialisation and exploitation that old Europe long considered the New World to be.