philharmonie zuidnederland

Francis Poulenc could not have guessed that he gave his very last concert in the last weekend of January 1963 in the Staargebouw in Maastricht. On Wednesday, January 30, Poulenc cancelled a lunch appointment from his Paris apartment. Less than a few hours later, he suffered a fatal heart attack. When Duncan Ward learned of this story, he had to conduct Poulenc's music – in the same city, where Poulenc gave his very last concert exactly 60 years ago. For this program, Duncan enters into an exciting collaboration with the Iranian-American harpsichord virtuoso Mahan Esfahani. Esfahani performs Poulenc's dancing Harpsichord Concerto. 'A wonderful party', The Times wrote enthusiastically after one of Esfahani’s earlier performances. And what music fits better than Beethoven's Seventh, which Wagner called “the apotheosis of dance”?

A ode to Francis Poulenc