Dances and Dreams

Frank Martin was born in Geneva in 1890. He studied in his hometown and developed into one of the most important composers of French-speaking Switzerland. Just a few years after Martin’s birth, the American-born composer George Templeton Strong settled in Geneva, having already made several visits to Switzerland. Strong and Martin got on well on a personal level and also pursued similar musical interests. They both composed in a style that oscillates between late-Romanticism and Modernism while remaining essentially tonal, and both quite consciously placed a focus on what they inherited from the European musical tradition. The best examples of this are to be found in the two pieces by these Genevan colleagues that serve to frame our concert programme “Dances and dreams”: Martin’s Pavane couleur du temps, composed in 1920 as a string quintet and arranged for chamber orchestra in 1954, takes an old courtly dance as its model, turning it into an exciting, impressionistic sound-painting. By contrast, Templeton Strong’s Chorale on a theme of Leo Hassler offers a 20th-century perspective on a famous melody by Leo Hassler, the German Baroque composer who provided none other than Johann Sebastian Bach with the material for his best-known chorales.

Between these two Genevan pieces, we are delighted to be able to present two soloists who are in a class of their own: The extraordinary violinist Sebastian Bohren from Winterthur will be performing a rarely heard violin concerto that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy composed in his youth, plus a nocturnal lullaby by Paul Juon, whose roots lay in Canton Graubünden. After the popular Holberg Suite by Edvard Grieg, the harpist Alexander Boldachev, based today in Zurich, will reveal to us the broad spectrum of his musical creativity and the full range of his instrument, from dances to dreamlands, with his own arrangements of a lute concerto by Antonio Vivaldi, the Danse macabre by Saint-Saëns and a movement from Isaac Albéniz’s Spanish suite.

This benefit concert “Dances and dreams” is being organised by ANDERMATT MUSIC in collaboration with the Üetliberg Rotary Club. It reflects the declared aims of Rotary International, which is committed to a world where respect, ethics, justice, international understanding and peace are paramount.

For each ticket sold, CHF 50 will go to SAO Association for Displaced Women, which supports especially vulnerable women refugees in Greece. SAO was awarded the Red Cross Prize 2023 for its work. This concert is in commemoration of its tenth anniversary.