Lorenzo Viotti dirigeert Wagners Der Ring ohne Worte

Bruce Liu with Saint-Saëns

Canadian pianist Bruce Liu, the brilliant winner of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2021, makes his debut with the Netherlands Philharmonic. He does so with Saint-Saëns' Fifth Piano Concerto . The nickname 'Egyptian' refers to the second movement, which is based on an ancient Egyptian love song, but the French composer also incorporated his travel impressions to Brazil and Southeast Asia, among other places, into this composition. You imagine yourself on a boat trip down the Nile, where temples pass by and the oarsmen sing their traditional songs.

Lorenzo Viotti conducts a remarkable Wagner

Naturally, for Wagner, you have come to the right place with the Netherlands Philharmonic and resident guest conductor Lorenzo Viotti. Since the 1990s, the orchestra has performed legendary renditions of Wagner's Ring cycle at the Dutch National Opera. More recently, Viotti's performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin received rave reviews. For instance, Trouw wrote that 'Lorenzo Viotti made choir and orchestra shine in a blisteringly suspenseful Lohengrin'. Tonight, Lorenzo Viotti brings a very special Wagner to the stage. While the composer needed fourteen hours of opera for his complete Der Ring des Nibelungen , conductor Lorin Maazel felt it could be shorter. He took the ultimate essence of Wagner's megalomaniacal work and condensed it into a thrilling symphonic poem of just over an hour, from the mystical opening notes of Das Rheingold to the dramatic final notes of Götterdämmerung.