RTVE Orquesta de Cámara

The RTVE Orquesta de cámara was founded in order to give selected members of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Radio Televisión Española the opportunity to prove themselves as first-rate chamber musicians. The ensemble performs regularly at major Spanish music festivals in cities including Cuenca, Granada, Úbeda, Soria and Santander. In Ljubljana they will be conducted by Marc Moncusí, who trained at the Madrid Royal Music Conservatory and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh before going on to study with Jesús López Cobos in Cincinnati and Daniel Barenboim in Berlin. The soloists will be the Armenian-born pianist Dmitry Ishkhanov, who in 2016 became the youngest finalist in the history of the Eurovision Young Musicians competition, held that year in Cologne, and the Madrid- and Paris-trained Spanish trumpeter Antón Borja, principal trumpet of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Radio Televisión Española. The concert in the Slovenian Philharmonic will open with Vistas al mar by Spanish composer Eduard Toldrà, who made an important contribution to Catalan culture. Dmitri Shostakovich actually planned his first piano concerto as a double concerto for piano and trumpet, while his sombre Chamber Symphony, an arrangement for string orchestra of his »autobiographical« String Quartet No. 8 by the conductor Rudolf Barshai, was written at a time when the composer was already physically and mentally shattered by his experiences with Stalin. The last item on the programme is Romanian Caprice, a work by the versatile Romanian musician Lucian Moraru, the founder of the ensemble Traffic Strings.