Zuzana Ferjenčíková

International Brucknerfest Linz 2025. Zuzana Ferjenčíková conjures up images in the mind's eye with arrangements of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and symphonic poems by Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Hardly any other work thematises the connection between visuals and sound as complexly as Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Each of the ten numbers with titles such as The Gnome, The Old Castle, The Hut on Chicken Feet or The Hero's Gate represents a picture by the artist Viktor Hartmann, who died the year before the composition. Mussorgsky wrote the cycle after visiting an exhibition of more than 400 works by Hartmann in St. Petersburg and set the strolling from one painting to the next to music in the promenades between the picture-related numbers.

In the first half of the concert, the multi-award-winning Slovakian organist Zuzana Ferjenčíková contrasts this series of paintings with Sergei Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead a work inspired by Arnold Böcklin's painting of the same name, as well as Franz Liszt's Prometheus, whose pictorial power in turn draws on Johann Gottfried Herder's dramatic poem The Unleashed Prometheus .