Programme:

Music of Spain, Portugal and Latin America

Maurice Ravel, Pablo de Sarasate, Manuel de Falla, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Ástor Piazzolla and more

Cast:

Olga Šroubková – violin
Martina Kociánová – presenter
Ilyich Rivas – conductor

The French composer Maurice Ravel was inspired mainly by his beloved Spain and its folklore. The compositions’ names speak for themselves: Spanish Rhapsody, The Spanish Hour, and Bolero. Pablo de Sarasate was a Spanish composer and violinist, but he significantly influenced the Parisian music life at the end of the 19th century. His most performed compositions, based on Spanish folklore, are the Gypsy Airs, Carmen Fantasy or Spanish Dances that were composed with the intention to please the audience and prove the interpreter’s quality.

At the beginning of the 20th century appeared Manuel de Falla, another Spanish composer who was also inspired by folk music. He too spent some time in Paris, enchanted by impressionism. The most successful were his two ballets The Three-Cornered Hat and Love the Magician. The work of the Brazil composer Heitor Villa-Lobos is characteristic for merging the elements of folk and popular music – there is a mixture of Amazon tribes’ music and Brazil music with European elements; the music is full of singing and magical sounds. His most famous works are the Chôros and the Bachianas Brasileiras series. Ástor Piazzolla, an Argentine composer, was “the king of tango”. He enriched traditional tango by elements of jazz and music of modern world composers, restyling it into the so-called tango nuevo. In 1953, his piece Buenos Aires won the first place in a competition along with a scholarship in Paris.