Karina Canellakis dirigeert Ravel, De Raaff en Janáček

After performances at the Lucerne Festival and Musikfest Berlin, it is high time that Robin de Raaff's L'Azur is heard in the Netherlands, with Janáček's impressive Glagolitic Mass as the apotheosis. Azure blue

It is the church bells in the poem L'Azur by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé that win Robin de Raaff over. This poem will form the basis for a composition dedicated to Pierre Boulez. De Raaff is writing it in 2025 as a tribute to this prominent composer and conductor, whose hundredth birthday is being celebrated. The overwhelming blue sky takes center stage in the poem. Azure blue is also the ocean on which Maurice Ravel sails his boat, to music that undulates and glitters and makes the orchestra and the hall sway.

Cathedral of sound

From his country retreat, Leoš Janáček took long walks in the woods: 'I felt a cathedral rising from the vast expanse of the forests.' Janáček was inspired to write the Glagolitic Mass, for which he used Old Church Slavonic, a language that was already used in his native region of Moravia in the ninth century. He composed an energetic, jubilant mass with powerful brass fanfares and an impressive organ part. A work in good hands with Karina Canellakis, who proved this with her impressive series of Janáček operas in the Matinee.