New Year’s Concert – Waltzes, Opera and Film Music

The Belgian National Orchestra kicks off the new year under the baton of American conductor Ryan McAdams. Besides works by the ‘King of Waltz’ Johann Strauss Jr – including the well-known An der schönen blauen Donau – the orchestra will perform several opera and operetta excerpts by Jacques Offenbach and film scores by Nino Rota.

The Franco-German composer Jacques Offenbach is known as the father of the operetta genre. One of his best-known works is La belle Hélène, a parody of the Trojan War. Offenbach also wrote more serious pieces such as the romantic opera Les Fées du Rhin and his magnum opus Les contes d’Hoffmann. The latter work bundles a number of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fantastic tales in a five-part opera with the writer as the (unlucky in love) protagonist. The Barcarole, a Venetian gondola song, opens the fourth act in which Hoffmann meets the courtesan Giulietta in Venice.

Nino Rota has gone down in history as the composer of the film score for The Godfather trilogy and for Federico Fellini’s films. The New Year’s concert will feature music from the Fellini films 8 ½ (about a famous Italian film director who suffers from director’s block) and Amarcord (also autobiographical, about Fellini’s childhood in Fascist Rimini in 1937).

Ryan McAdams, conductor