Nomad Concerts: War and Peace
The great novel by Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace, is the theme of this recital, which is divided between two great works: On a leafy path, by Leoš Janáček, a metaphorical exploration of the composer’s inner world, written in times of peace but finished shortly time before the 1st World War, and the 6th Sonata by Prokofiev, already written during the 2nd World War and the first of the trilogy known as War Sonatas, a work that seems to herald the invasion of Russia the following year.
In between, a rarity: the only song written by Tolstoy – a composer in his spare time – that has reached us, a simple waltz that reflects the great period of European peace lived between the death of Napoleon and the convulsions of the 20th century, a dance that dominates the courtly balls in the first part of Guerra e Paz.
Tolstoy was a huge inspiration for Janáček, an admirer of Russian culture, who modeled his first string quartet on the novel Sonata a Kreutzer, and for Prokofiev who, on War and Peace, based his greatest opera, a great epic fresco depicting the brutal invasion of Russia by Napoleonic troops in 1812.
With War and Peace, Humanity experiences, for the first time, as the Czech writer Milan Kundera says, a feeling hitherto unknown: «For the first time in the History of the Romance, Man is carried away by the force of History and ceases to be the owner of his destiny.”
Nomad Concerts » Toy Ensemble » Raquel Cravino and Cristiano Holtz
Source: https://www.ccb.pt/evento/diana-botelho-vieira/