Payare Leads Strauss’ A Hero’s Life

Rafael Payare, conductor
Yefim Bronfman, piano

GUBAIDULINA: Fairytale Poem (Poema-Skazka)
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491
R. STRAUSS: A Hero's Life (Ein Heldenleben), Op. 40

The 2026-2027 season opens with Rafael Payare conducting the Orchestra in a concert celebrating the power of human imagination.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Poema-Skazka ("Fairy-Tale Poem") tells of a little piece of chalk that spends its days writing mathematical exercises but one evening takes on a life of its own, covering the blackboard with flowers and castles and fantasies, sacrificing itself for the power of imagination. Written in 1971 for a children’s program on Soviet radio, it accompanied a reading of a story by the 20th century Czech writer, Miloš Macourek.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 is one of the most dramatic pieces he wrote in any form. The first movement has a thrilling tragic grandeur, an epic feeling that directly inspired Beethoven and many other composers who came after. Pianist Yefim Bronfman returns to Jacobs Music Center for this electrifying concerto.

Of all Strauss’s tone poems, none is more sumptuously and gorgeously theatrical than Ein Heldenleben, “A Hero’s Life". It tells an outrageous story, at once tremendously grand and hilariously funny, filled with laughter and mockery. No wonder this one piece has been such an inspiration for generations of film-composers!