Orchestra concert: Fire of Youth

In addition to works by Jean Sibelius and Igor Stravinsky, the HfK Symphony Orchestra will also perform the world premiere of Laehwang Jang's work as part of his concert exam.

Programme

• Jean Sibelius: En Saga, Op. 9 – Tone poem for orchestra (1902)
• Laehwang Jang: Ruach IV
  for large orchestra 2025 (world premiere)
• Igor Stravinsky: Petrushka – Burlesque scenes in four pictures (1947)

Three major orchestral compositions, whose composers delved into the depths of their culture in very different ways and integrated it into their language, which was then influenced by Europe. Motivation also played an important role: Jean Sibelius left the climate in Helsinki, which he perceived as stifling, went to Vienna in 1890 at the age of 25, and returned to Finland in 1906. The German Romantics were his role models on the one hand – Brahms, Wagner, Schumann, many others – but on the other hand, he sought the roots of Finnish music in his major works and created a national legacy for it in many compositions. The Russian Igor Stravinsky left the Soviet Union for the first time in 1910 and then permanently after 1917 for political reasons, lived in Paris and America, and did not return – except for a brief and tense exception in 1962. The Korean Laehwang Jang came to Germany to study, to a country that was a model and benchmark for aesthetics: German classical and romantic music and contemporary music. The programme thus tells of the foreign and the familiar in music. (Ute Schalz-Laurenze)