Franck / Bruckner

Marta Zabaleta, a Basque pianist with long ties to the Basque National Orchestra, will present a work never before performed by the orchestra. César Franck's Symphonic Variations are the closest thing he composed to a piano concerto, an instrument in which he was a youthful virtuoso, though he later put it aside in favour of the organ. The former pianist with the gigantic hands would return to the instrument in his sixties to play this very difficult score with its cyclical structure, in the style of his famous Symphony in D minor. In the second part of the programme, Joana Carneiro, chief conductor of the Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa until 2022 and much in demand in the operatic field, will take on the monumental challenge of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4, a seventy-minute score that the Austrian composer revised for over six years, and whose colossal buildup slowly leads into one of the most imposing climaxes in all of Romantic music.