A ROMANTIC EVENING IN FRANCE at Meridian Arts Centre - George Weston Recital Hall

Daniel Vnukowski performs César Franck’s Symphonic Variations, a late-Romantic cyclic work in three parts in which the main theme grows and transforms into the thematic material of subsequent movements. Vincent D’Indy’s Symphonie sur un Chant Montagnard Français (Symphony on a French Mountain Air) begins with a pentatonic folk tune—which d’Indy heard in a French village overlooking the Cévennes. Closing the program is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C: a youthful work composed at the Paris Conservatory when Bizet was only seventeen, Symphony in C shares similarities to the work of Bizet’s teacher, Charles Gounod, but has been hailed as a masterpiece of the Romantic repertoire.

Kristian Alexander | conductor Daniel Vnukowski | pianist Jürgen Petrenko | host

7:10 p.m. Prélude: pre-concert recital (Alexander Gangurean, violin | Lusine Navoyan, cello) 7:20 p.m. Pre-concert talk (Mihaela Cudalbu, musicologist) Intermission discussion and Q&A with Daniel Vnukowski and Jürgen Petrenko.