Young Portuguese Orchestra

“You will bring resonance and music back to my lonely life (…)”, wrote Robert Schumann. Music, resonance, loneliness, time, expectations, change. Three meditations about exile, produced during different periods of retreat and solitude. As the inspiration for an entire life of listening, Haydn produced some of his most extraordinary pages in the three decades of isolation that he spent in the service of the Esterházy family. The originality of the form, the intensity of the music (sombre and gloomy), the atmosphere, the texture. Elements that take us on an innermost journey. For what is to be a world preview of TOYS ARE US (commission no. JOP 2021), the young composer João Carlos Pinto (born, 1998) accepted the challenge of creating a modular work (so that in this way it can be performed by different-sized orchestras, in order to accommodate the limitations placed on the number of musicians on stage, due to the current pandemic), composed in a courageous and experimental language, using the orchestra as a testing ground (we are reminded of Haydn’s radical experimentation at the Esterházy court) and blazing new trails without compunction.  A symphony-meditation (about inner silence?) written twice (in 1841 and 1851), overflowing with fantasy, impetus, introspection, fragility, exaltation and hope — an extraordinary journey from darkness to light (we are reminded of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). Throughout a life in which he was beset with mental and physical illness, Schumann clearly remembers: “to send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.” – Pedro Carneiro