In late May, Dimitri Kitaenko will conduct two concerts in Zagreb. On May 25 he will be at the helm of the Zagreb Philharmonic at the Lisinski Hall. The program begins with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for strings op. 48 and will end with the Ballet Suite No 3 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Inbetween the audience will hear the rarely played Concerto for tuba and orchestra by Alexander Arutiunian with Krunoslav Babic as soloist. This work was composed by the Armenian composer in 1992.
On May 27 Maestro Kitaenko will conduct the Zagreb Philharmonic in a great open air concert with a popular program, which begins with “Sunny fields”, a symphonic poem written by the talented Croatian composer Blagoje Bersa, a contemporary of Mahler, Strauss and Debussy. Lehar’s popular arias “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” and “Freunde, das Leben ist lebenswert” follow the entertaining suite with extracts from Shostakovich’s Ballet Suite No 3 which is in both concerts on the program and was composed in 1952. In fact, the composer had asked his friend Levon Atovmyan to put together this suite from music of earlier compositions and to orchestrate it. Some music comes from the ballets The Limpid Stream (1935) and The Bolt (1931) as well as the incidental music to Balzac’s Comédie Humaine (1934). After the final of Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5, the concert will end with colourful waltzes: the flower waltz from The Nutcracker by Piotr Tchaikovsky and the famous waltz by Chatchaturian from “Maskerade”.