Family concert, recommended for ages 5 and up.
Bernhard Russi returns to the Andermatt Concert Hall to tell the fairy tale "The Firebird", set to music by Igor Stravinsky. The Swiss Orchestra provides the music. Recommended for ages 5 and up.
About the program:
Every child in Glarus and Uri knows the legend of the two roosters, who are largely responsible for the current border between the two cantons: In a dispute over fertile land, the inhabitants negotiate a deal. They both send a knowledgeable pedestrian into the race, who is only allowed to set off from Altdorf or Linthal when the rooster crows. The cantonal border is to be fixed at the point where the two hikers meet.
Understandably, both parties are keen for their rooster to crow as early as possible, but they have chosen two different strategies: The people of Glarus let their rooster have a good time, feed it extensively and hope that - thus strengthened - it will wake up the population early in the morning. But the people of Glarus, long since awake, gather sadly around the peacefully sleeping rooster. The people of Uri, on the other hand, choose the better tactic - albeit with less sense for animal welfare: they let their cockerel starve, who then crows so early that the Uri rock-climber is already jumping down the mountain when his Glarus colleague sets off. - And so, despite its location in the middle of the Glarus mountains, Switzerland's largest alp, the Urnerboden, has belonged to the canton of Uri since 1315.
The Swiss Orchestra's family concert is similarly legendary, but about a completely different fowl. To colorful music by Igor Stravinsky, Bernhard Russi tells the story of the firebird, which the composer and his librettists wove into a new legend based on three old Russian fairy tales: while chasing the flickering firebird, the young prince Ivan ends up in the garden of the immortal sorcerer Kashtschei. Ivan catches the bird, releases it at his request and receives one of its golden feathers as a gift to help him in danger. 13 princesses then appear in the garden and Ivan immediately falls in love with Tsarevna. To see her again, Ivan enters the palace and is captured by the evil sorcerer, who threatens to turn him into a stone. With the help of the firebird, Ivan succeeds in uncovering the secret of Kashtchei's immortality and banishing the sorcerer's sinister power. Unlike the Swiss roosters used to draw boundaries, the firebird thus helps to unite Ivan and Tsarevna, who now live their lives happily together.
Program:
Igor Stravinsky:
"The Firebird" (arr. Paul Leonard Schäffer)
Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.
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