Modest Mussorgsky’s works are virtuoso pieces of programme music in which the composer loved to immerse himself in the world of Russian literature and fairy tales, creating the most splendid snapshots of imagination, intimacy and suspense. This also applies to his opera The Fair at Sorochyntsi, which he based on Nikolai Gogol’s novella of the same title and that incorporated all manner of folk songs, funny moments, amorous entanglements, rumours and stories. His depictions of the lively goings-on at the fair are full of colourful sounds and can be clearly discerned both in the overture and the Gopak, a Ukrainian folk dance.

Mussorgsky’s cycle Pictures at an Exhibition became even more famous. He had originally composed it only for piano and it was actually Maurice Ravel’s orchestration that led to the piece’s triumph in international concert halls and that has never ceased to carry its listeners off into the mysterious worlds of fairy-tale characters, impressive monuments or everyday life.

The sounds of the saxophone are just as familiar to us as the Pictures at an Exhibition: jazz, soul and rock music are hardly imaginable without the instrument. But very few of us will have heard it as a solo instrument in a concert of classical music, like the Concert for Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra composed by Alexander Glazunov in 1934. The instrument was only developed in 1840 by its name-giver Adolphe Sax as an alternative to classical woodwind instruments with a full and rounded sound in the lower positions.

This work will be presented by Asya Fateyeva, born in Ukraine in 1990 and winner of the International Adolphe Sax Award, who discovered her love for the saxophone at the age of ten and sees herself as an ambassador of the hitherto underrepresented classical saxophone repertory.

The Latvian conductor Ainārs Rubiķis will support her in this mission. He was most recently General Music Director at Komische Oper Berlin and will be conducting the State Orchestra of Lower Saxony for the first time.