The HCMC Ballet and Symphony Orchestra (HBSO) is presenting a program on November 29, featuring a world premiere by Spanish composer Iluminada Perez Troya.

Spanish conductor Raul Miguel Rodriguez - Photo: Courtesy of HBSO

It also includes major works by fellow Spaniard Manuel de Falla and his French contemporary Claude Debussy.

Iluminada Perez Troya is a professor of music theory in southern Spain and a well-known composer. She can be seen conducting several of her vigorous and colorful compositions on YouTube.

The piece that is to receive its world premiere in HCMC is entitled Elegia (a Ana Belen Ruiz).

The entire concert will have a distinctly Spanish feel. It will be conducted by the Spanish conductor Raul Miguel Rodriguez, and the solo pianist in De Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain (‘Noches en los Jardines de Espana’ in Spanish) will be Spanish pianist Hilario Segovia Badia.

But in fact the Spanish compositions only occupy the first half of the program. The second half is taken up by two compositions by Frenchman Claude Debussy.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain is in three sections, describing three gardens. The first describes the jasmine-scented garden that surrounds the Alhambra palace in Granada. The second, described as “a distant dance”, is in a garden that’s never identified. And the third section is set in the gardens of the Sierra de Cordoba, hills in southern Spain.

The work was premiered in 1916. Falla was the solo pianist in the London premiere in 1921.

The piece has been described as sensuous and exotic, with the piano part fitting in smoothly with the orchestra’s music, and never dominant. Some have considered it, however, as sorrowful, and even tragic.

Hilario Segovia Badia, the soloist, can be seen playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No:1 on YouTube.

The concert’s second half begins with Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune (‘prelude to an afternoon of a fawn’). This short piece came to accompany a famous, some say notorious, dance sequence featuring Vaslav Nijinsky in the Ballets Russes (‘Russian ballet’).

It was previously performed by the HBSO orchestra on August 29 in a concert featuring another Spanish item, Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.

The main Debussy item, though, is La Mer (‘the sea’). It is again in three sections, and has often been called “impressionistic”, in implied comparison with Impressionist painters of nature such as Monet. Debussy hated the comparison, however, but what is certain is that the work doesn’t convey the dramatic storms or languorous sensuality of the sea in a composer such as Wagner. Instead, it is small-scale, focusing on small drops of water perhaps, rather than great waves and tides.

Raul Miguel Rodriguez, the conductor, is also a trumpet player. He is currently Artistic Director of the Orquesta Madrid Sinfonica (the Madrid Symphony Orchestra).

Tickets for the concert range from VND650,000 down to VND200,000, with a special concession for students of VND80,000 on production of a student card. The concert begins at 8 p.m.

Saigon Times