Recital Anna Vinnitskaya

At Lucerne Festival, carnival is sometimes celebrated in the summer. At least when the great German-Russian pianist Anna Vinnitskaya does the honors. With Robert Schumann’s Carnaval, she will conjure from the keyboard the famous character types from the Italian commedia dell’arte: Pierrot, Arlequin, Pantalon, and Colombine. Schumann’s work also depicts a fictitious secret society of artists, the progressive Davidsbündler, who engage in battle against the convention-loving Philistines. The contemporary composer Jörg Widmann, a great admirer of Schumann, has gone one better with his eleven Circus Dances. They encompass a fanfare, a boogie-woogie dance, several waltzes, a nursery rhyme, and even a “Bavarian-Babylonian March” at the end, in which a yodeling classic gets mixed up in the proceedings. Widman has left nothing out of this work, which is a genuine pleasure to listen to. Incidentally, he even includes a Venetian gondola song. And with this, Anna Vinnitskaya will bring us full circle to the beginning of her recital, which starts off with delectable selections from Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words.