Oosterse Klanken Van Sheherazade & Darvishi – Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam

About this event

This concert unites two cello concertos and two cellists in a program tinged with Eastern color. It opens with the world premiere of a new cello concerto by the young Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi, who studied composition in Amsterdam and The Hague after piano studies in Tehran. Her music contains authentic Iranian elements, ideally suited to the Austrian-Iranian cellist Kian Soltani. The Franco-German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt then performs the Cello Concerto by the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, a fascinating work that begins with an extended solo-cello cadenza. The program concludes with the beloved orchestral suite Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, inspired by the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights — a frame narrative with Arabic and Egyptian elements, in which Rimsky-Korsakov enchants the listener with oriental atmospheres just as Scheherazade captivates the sultan with her stories.