RENATA POKUPIĆ, mezzosopran
ZAGREB SOLOISTS
RIJEKA PIANO TRIO
KRUNOSLAV MARIĆ, violin
VID VELJAK, cello
FILIP FAK, the piano
Gost: HRVOJE PHILIPS, viola
Renata Pokupić
Program:
Gustav Mahler: Quartet for violin, viola, cello and piano in A minor
Gustav Mahler: Five songs to lyrics by Friedrich Rückert (arrangement for mezzo-soprano and piano quartet: Gerhard Präsent) Gustav Mahler: Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony in C sharp minor
arrangement for string orchestra: Sreten Krstić)
Franz Schubert: String quartet in D minor, no. 14, op. post., D. 810, Death and the girl (arrangement for string orchestra: Gustav Mahler)
The beautiful, unforgettable, melancholic Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, which gained world fame in the famous film Death in Venice by the great Luchino Visconti, is Mahler’s declaration of love to Alma Schindler, his future wife. The great conductor Willem Mengelberg, Mahler’s close friend, wrote in a copy of his score that Mahler “instead of a love letter sent Alma a manuscript Adagietta, and then not a word!”, and she, herself an incredibly gifted composer, intoxicated by the beauty and emotional power of music, immediately understood his message of love and simply wrote to him: “Come!”. Mahler met Alma on November 7, 1901 in a Viennese salon, and already on December 7 they were secretly engaged.
Franz Schubert
If human life is a wondrous weaving stretched out in space and time, at the imaginary endpoints of which, in the poet’s words, are Eros and Thanatos, love and death, then the famous string quartet Death and the Girl by the Viennese master Franz Schubert stands at the opposite, diametrically opposite end of the Adagietto: originated from the famous song Death and the Girl, whose main motifs the composer “embedded” in the slow movement, Schubert’s string quartet is a testimony of the artist’s confrontation with death. Tormented by a serious illness and life crises, Schubert nevertheless managed to create a masterpiece that is a kind of “musical confession”, a fight with the demon of death transformed into tones of enormous energy and incredible tension.