Maslenitsa, written by French composer Guillaume Connesson in 2011, is an extremely dazzling and colourful orchestral work, inspired by the tradition of a holiday celebrated in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, associated with the ritual of bidding farewell to winter. The Maslenitsa festival combines pagan and Christian elements, while intertwining the mood of carnival season with the approaching Lent; Connesson’s work expresses this ambivalence of emotions in its three-movement structure, in which the fast outer movements refer to the element of dance, while the middle movement introduces a reflective chorale theme. As the composer writes, it is ‘a picture combining exuberant joy and suffering’, created as a tribute to the cultural tradition that fascinates him.

Composed in 1901, Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is a widely known and universally loved work, which can be said to be the quintessence of the Romantic style and spirit: filled with lyrical emotionalism, pathos and melancholy, and musically based on highly melodious, deeply memorable themes. Written in the classical three-movement form of an instrumental concerto, it is very uniform in style and expression.

Mieczysław Weinberg, an outstanding composer of Polish-Jewish origins living in the USSR, who is now being rediscovered, composed his Symphony No. 3 around 1950, but its final version was completed 10 years later, when the work was first performed in Moscow. The phenomenon of Weinberg’s style, clearly visible in this Symphony, stems from the precision of his musical language, as well as its simplicity and communicativeness, which makes us perceive his extremely vivid music as being imbued with childlike imagination: trusting and naïve, in the best sense of the word.

Robert Losiak