DOHA: Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra will play concert Kitajenko Conducts Shostakovich 10, which will take place tomorrow at Katara Cultural Village Opera House.
Antonin Dvorak wrote his Cello Concerto in 1894 and 1895, during his time in New York as the Director of the National Conservatory of America. Scholars have debated the depth of American influence on other famous works he wrote there, including the New World Symphony and the American String Quartet, but there’s nothing American about the Concerto. However, its origin is in part due to a performance Dvorak heard in Brooklyn of the Cello Concerto of Victor Herbert, a faculty member at the Conservatory. Dvorak was impressed how Herbert, a cellist as well as an operetta composer best known for Babes in Toyland, enabled the cello to stand out in relation to the orchestra. Taking on this challenge himself, Dvorak created one of the most poetical of 19th-century concertos.
Conductor of honour of the concert Dmitrij Kitajenko is one of the great conductors of our time. Equally esteemed in eastern and western Europe, he regularly conducts prestigious orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra London and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.
Dmitrij Kitajenko was born in Leningrad, where he studied at the renowned Glinka School of Music and the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. He went on to study with Leo Ginzburg in Moscow and in the legendary conducting class of Hans Swarowsky and Karl Osterreicher in Vienna.
He obtained distinctions in each case. In 1969 he won the first International Herbert von Karajan Conducting Competition in Berlin and was appointed principal conductor of the influential Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow at the age of only twenty-nine.
In the early 1970s he very successfully conducted a great number of operas in Moscow and in cities such as Vienna, Munich and Brussels in Western Europe.
He became principal conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic in 1976, making it one of the leading orchestras in the world during the fourteen years of his direction and appearing with it in the most important musical centres of Europe, the USA and Japan.
