PROGRAMME:

Béla Bartók – Divertimento for String Orchestra

In August 1939, just days before the outbreak of the Second World War, Béla Bartók withdrew to a
chalet in Saanen, Switzerland. There, far from the political tensions engulfing Europe, he composed
his Divertimento for String Orchestra in little more than two weeks, at the request of conductor
and patron Paul Sacher.

The circumstances surrounding its creation lend the work an almost mysterious significance.
Outside, the quiet of the Swiss mountains; beyond them, a continent on the edge of catastrophe.
Bartók was seeking refuge in nature while the world around him was becoming increasingly
unstable.

The title Divertimento evokes the light-hearted instrumental music of the 18th century. Bartók
embraces tradition while transforming it through his personal musical language, deeply influenced
by Hungarian and Eastern European folk music. Particularly remarkable is the contrast between the
lively outer movements and the dark, introspective Molto adagio at the heart of the work.

Here, the apparent serenity of the natural world is suddenly overshadowed by something darker.
Nature becomes not merely a place of refuge, but a counterpoint to a human world threatened by
forces beyond its control.

Bartók thus opens our programme with a first form of force of nature: the stillness before the
storm.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Serenade for String Orchestra

Almost sixty years earlier, Tchaikovsky composed his Serenade for String Orchestra, Op. 48,
inspired in part by his profound admiration for Mozart and the classical tradition. The work was
completed in 1880 and first performed in St Petersburg in 1881.

A serenade traditionally suggests music of celebration and elegance. Yet Tchaikovsky transforms
the genre into something far more personal. Beneath its graceful surface lies a world of longing,
melancholy, passion and dance.

The famous Waltz radiates elegance and movement, while the Elegy turns inward, revealing an
intimate and vulnerable voice. The opening movement evokes the elegance of the classical style,
while the finale draws upon Russian musical traditions.

Within the context of our programme, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade represents another kind of natural
force: the forces within us. Human emotions ebb and flow like the changing seasons; joy can turn
into melancholy, calm into longing, and movement into stillness.

Astor Piazzolla – The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires

With Astor Piazzolla, nature moves from the landscape into the city.
His Four Seasons of Buenos Aires – Las cuatro estaciones porteñas are not conventional musical
portraits of spring, summer, autumn and winter. Instead, Piazzolla creates the seasons of a city:
Buenos Aires, with its heat, restless energy, melancholy and unmistakable tango rhythm.

The four pieces were not originally conceived as a single cycle. Verano porteño (“Buenos Aires
Summer”) was written in 1965 as incidental music for a theatre production; the other seasons
followed between 1969 and 1970. Only later did the four works increasingly come to be performed
together.

Piazzolla’s seasons are therefore not simply those of nature. They are seasons of human life. The
tango becomes the voice of the city – sensual, restless, passionate and sometimes lonely. Where
Vivaldi depicts the changing seasons of the European landscape, Piazzolla portrays a city itself as a
living organism, constantly breathing, moving and transforming.