The First Symphony Concert

Looking for the perfect way to start the New Year? Find a moment of repose in the world of music. The Polish National Opera's New Year concert features a programme of Beethoven, Strauss, and Prokofiev performed by prominent soprano Julia Kleiter and the Orchestra of the Polish National Opera under the baton of Maestro Yoel Gamzou. 

The programme will open with Ludwig van Beethoven’s monumental and highly demanding Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b (1806), one of the most poignant and compelling works ever written by the master of the classical period. This is one of the four overtures Beethoven composed for his Fidelio. Since it was not included in the final version of the opera, nowadays it is usually performed as a concert piece.

Next, we will transport the audience to a universe of lyricism and melancholy by the agency of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, one of the most beautiful 20th-century pieces for voice and orchestra. Strauss drew inspiration from Hermann Hesse's poetry and Eichendorff’s poem Im Abendrot (At Dusk), whose main theme of an elderly couple reflecting on the meaning of life moved him deeply. As a result, he began writing a cycle of songs, yet completed only four before dying.

The concert will culminate with a selection of vibrant, melodic, and high-spirited suites from Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. The first two (1936) were composed to whet the audience’s appetite for the ballet as a whole, which the management of the Bolshoi Theatre refused to mount, as they considered the music ‘impossible’ to dance to.

Orchestra of the Polish National Opera