The Ho Chi Minh City Ballet Symphony Orchestra and Opera (HBSO) will present a program featuring Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Saigon Opera House on May 26.

A concert show at Saigon Opera House (Source: VNA)

The programme will be conducted by the HBSO’s Music Director, Meritorious Artist Tran Vuong Thach.

Sergei Rachmaninov completed his Second Piano Concerto in 1901, surprisingly after a period of several years’ depression. It is in three movements, the norm for concertos. It has been extensively used as the sound track of movies, and its themes have formed the basis of many subsequently famous songs.

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is one of the great composer’s five most celebrated symphonies, along with his Third, Fifth, Sixth and Ninth. The celebrated opera composer Richard Wagner found it especially momentous. He declared it to be the “apotheosis of the dance”, in other words dance raised to a divine level.

Rachmaninov (1873 – 1943) was a Russian-born composer who introduced jazz-related rhythms into classical works.

Beethoven (1770 – 1827), on the other hand, was a classical composer who expanded the traditions perfected by Haydn and Mozart at the dawn of what was to become the Romantic Era.

(Source: VNA)