Concerto Grosso

Dmitry Sitkovetsky is a remarkably versatile musician, active as a violinist, a conductor, an arranger and a recording artist. His successful career as a soloist is documented by an extensive discography running to more than 40 recordings, encompassing an extraordinarily diverse musical repertoire. He will appear at the 73rd Ljubljana Festival as the conductor of the Ensemble Dissonance, comprising internationally acclaimed musicians from Ljubljana who are committed to performing and developing chamber music at the highest artistic level. Two members of the ensemble will appear as soloists. Benjamin Ziervogel is a chamber musician and concertmaster and performs regularly as a soloist with world-famous orchestras. Janez Podlesek teaches at the Ljubljana Academy of Music and regularly performs works by Slovene composers as a soloist. The first part of the programme will be dedicated to 20th-century music. Arvo Pärt, one of the foremost exponents of musical minimalism, composed Fratres in 1977 in his characteristic »tintinnabuli « style, as a sequence of variations on a six-bar theme. Dating from the same year, Concerto Grosso No. 1 was the first of six works by Alfred Schnittke composed according to the Baroque principle of alternation between soloists and orchestra. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky created The Seasons as a suite of twelve piano pieces capturing the characters of the twelve months of the year as he saw them in his native Russia. The suite, orchestral versions of which are also popular, will be performed on this occasion in an arrangement by Jakov Jakulov.