Concert No. 7: Les Anneaux de la mémoire – With Dmitri Makhtin and Alexander Rudin

The young Finnish maestro Kalle Kuusava opens the concert at the head of the Ural Youth Orchestra: together they perform Elgar’s  Prelude from The Dream of Gerontius, which tells the tale of an old man whose soul is guided by a guardian angel toward the final judgement. The captivating work mixes the English choral tradition with Wagnerian influences in a nonetheless typical Elgarian orchestration. Kuusava and his young musicians are then joined on stage for Koering’s new work, which honors the Greek goddess of memory Mnemosyne and is dedicated to Svetlanov himself. The program culminates in Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini, a piece inspired by the moment in Dante’s Divine Comedy when the heroine falls in love with the brother of her husband...