Nicholas Angelich: Liszt, Années de Pèlerinage

Over het evenement

Nicholas Angelich returns to the Dijon Opera with a repertoire whose success lies in its subtlety of expression, profound affinity and discreet, tender feeling.

Written over a period of four decades, the Années de pelerinage form a poetic travel diary for Liszt, capturing his impressions as he moved across Europe throughout his life. Landscapes, real or invented, literary evocations awakened by the contemplation of nature or from books, poetic images arising from the twilight on the shores of a lake: nature and culture mix inexorably in this sensitive and imaginative collection. The selection opens the first two notebooks.

With La Suisse, which Liszt visited in the 1830s with his mistress Marie d’Agoult, a whole universe of light and nature opens up to the listener, in turns violent or peaceful, transcended by the soft mist of memory, through harmonies that clearly herald the Impressionism of the French, with Debussy at the head of the list. From Italy, Liszt fled the images of Epinal and sought the extraordinary concentration of his poetry: fiery love, passionate and yet contained within the linguistic beauty of Petrarch’s Sonnets or the feverish and overflowing infernal or celestial visions of Dante’s Divine Comedy.