Ung Filharmoni
Vasily Petrenko Benjamin Britten
Claude Debussy

Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950) was the oldest student in class when he started conducting in St. Petersburg in 1906. He got a friend for life in the youngest student, Sergei Prokofiev, who later traveled to the West and strongly contributed to Myaskovsky becoming one of the most famous soviet composers during the Interwar Period.

Myaskovsky had written 24 symphonies when he composed Sinfonietta in A minor for string orchestra in 1945. The four movements in Sinfonietta consist of melodic and melancholic music from a mature composer who retained the joy of creation until the end.

The opera Peter Grimes premiered in June 1945, and became Benjamin Britten’s (1913-1976) breakthrough. The main character is a fisherman in an English coastal city, an outsider who is pushed to his limits by a hostile and suspicious crowd, and eventually chooses death at sea.

Britten collected four of the opera’s interludes for orchestra in the orchestral work Four Sea Interludes. The music in Britten’s interlude ranges from wavey, soft harmonics in “Moonlight” to frighteningly intense church bells in “Sunday Morning”.

Claude Debussy (1860-1918) grew up in Paris, but during a few magical summer weeks on the beaches of Cannes in childhood, he fell in love with the sea and dreamed of becoming a sailor. “My old friend, the sea; it is always infinite and beautiful. It really is the part of nature that puts you in the best place,” Debussy later stated.

The three pieces in La mer (The Sea) from 1905 are a tribute to the unpredictability and constant change of the sea. The music starts peacefully in “From dawn to noon on the sea” and continues lively with “Play of the Waves” before the intensity increases in “Dialogue of the wind and the sea”.