Kirill Petrenko dirige Josef Suk

Wherever Kirill Petrenko appears, he creates a sensation, and now he is slated to succeed Simon Rattle as the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. While Petrenko was serving as the general music director at the Berlin Comic Opera, he conducted symphonic works by Josef Suk for cpo that we are now offering to you in a 3 CD box at a special low price. Here too Petrenko comes with a guarantee of considerable quality enhancement. He has a particular interest in Josef Suk, a late romanticist of marvelous musical might. He offers a breathtaking interpretation of the great Asreal symphony, which was initially intended as an homage to Suk's admired father-in-law Dvorák, who had just recently died, but then became a heartrending double requiem when Dvorák's daughter, Suk's wife Otylka, died during the compositional process at the much too early age of twenty-seven. His symphonic poem A Summer's Tale begins where his Asreal symphony left off: with the attempt to surmount the grief felt at the loss of two beloved human beings - his teacher Dvorák and his wife, Dvorák's daughter. This time nature - the summer season - is Suk's source of inspiration. On the third CD Petrenko turns to the Tale of a Winter's Evening overture after Shakespeare's drama A Winter's Tale. Already during the initial measures, however, it becomes clear that Suk has taken a long detour around program music and has thought up absolute music adhering in very large part to the classical principles of the sonata movement. Suk's The Ripening, a later tone poem composed between 1912 and 1917, describes a mature artist's retrospective look at his past life. Here this composer's outstanding artistic qualities are gathered together as if in a burning glass. The Orchestra of the Berlin Comic Opera demonstrates that it is absolutely equal to the high demands of the scores, and Petrenko's interpretive approach illuminates Suk's complex tone world and shows it in a suspenseful and richly pictorial light.