Ludwig van Beethoven:
Fidelio Overture, Op. 72c

Ludwig van Beethoven:
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37

Johannes Brahms:
Tragic Overture, Op. 81

Richard Strauss:
Don Juan, Op. 20

Kento Satsuma – piano
Anna Bangoura – speaker
Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
Conducted by students of the Zurich University of the Arts under the direction of Christoph-Mathias Mueller

For his only opera Fidelio, Beethoven composed four overtures. The first three evolved into extensive symphonic movements during the creative process. It was only shortly before the premiere of the third version of the opera in 1814 that Beethoven managed to create an overture that he considered sufficiently effective and appropriately long.

The birth of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto was also arduous and lengthy. During its first performance, the composer even played large parts of the concerto from memory. Beethoven’s friend and conductor, Ignaz von Seyfried, who turned the pages for him, recalled that many pages of the piano part were filled with blank staff lines and a few illegible hieroglyphics.

Brahms’ Tragic Overture was closely linked to his Academic Festival Overture, both composed in the summer of 1880. “One weeps, and the other laughs,” the composer aphoristically noted on the occasion of their joint performance in Wroclaw, Poland. The Tragic Overture is a dark work with moments of somber meditation contrasting with dramatically intense passages.

At the time of composing Don Juan, Richard Strauss was only a twenty-four-year-old artist. The extensive symphonic poem from 1888 was inspired by Nikolaus Lenau’s dramatic poem, portraying the libertine Don Juan ultimately succumbing to melancholy and desiring his own death.