Season opening 2024: Mozart and Rachmaninov

From the elegant Viennese classics to the big emotions – all started with a festive aperitif, one with bubbles: this is how the first concert of the season will be. Rakhmaninov's 2nd symphony is played at the first concert of the season, music that suits both the grandeur of the season when the fruits abound and the dahlias bloom, and the melancholy that can occur with the change of seasons. Rachmaninov knew his tools, and in that he has something in common with Mozart, who, as the musician Peter Bastian wrote, contains life's "irreconcilable opposites." The concert's aperitif is Carl Nielsen's swirling, cheerful overture to the opera Masquerade.

TRADITION AND RENEWAL

"I am completely afraid that I will forget to conduct because the music is so fantastic", said Anna Rakitina jokingly in an interview. Even though the music is one's work, it can be very captivating. Rakitina was born in Moscow, to a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother. She studied conducting in Moscow and in Hamburg, where she wrote a thesis on Rakhmaninov. Since then, she has had engagements with the finest orchestras in the USA, Europe and Japan – none mentioned, none forgotten, and among many awards is 2nd prize in the Danish Malko conducting competition in 2018. Rakitina has also held an important post as assistant conductor in Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the great American orchestras, whose musicians, as a Boston newspaper said, are experts in choosing conductors and getting the very best out of them.

"LIKE DRIVING A BMW"
It is the Danish conductor Michael Schønwandt who is quoted as saying that the two Dutch brothers, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, are like two BMWs. They were quite young, 10 and 13, when they debuted in Amsterdam with Mozart's Double Concerto. Three years later, Schønwandt conducted them in Poulenc's concert, and the following year, 2010, they had a contract with Deutsche Grammophon. Even they do not think that they are child prodigies. Just two regular guys who love to play music. That they should end up with an international career as a duo was not planned, it just happened, as it can happen when you have always played together and are not tired of each other at the end of the grand pianos.

Program:

C. Nielsen: Overture to Masquerade
WA Mozart: Concerto for two pianos and orchestra in E flat major KV365
S. Rakhmaninov: Symphony No. 2

Conducter

Anna Rakitina

Soloists:

Lucas and Arthur Jussen, piano