Programme
Texts: Arthur Conan Doyle
Music: Felix Mendelssohn, Nicolò Paganini, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Frédéric Chopin, Jacques Offenbach, Johannes Brahms, Pablo de Sarasate, Orlando di Lasso
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most fascinating and ever-current literary heroes. Already during the lifetime of series author Arthur Conan Doyle some readers were convinced that the great detective was a living person, thanks to Doyle’s meticulous attention to various realistic details – among which was music. Everyone knows that Holmes plays the violin, the instrument appears in most film adaptations and also in the recent television series, but the original story contains a number of other musical details. Holmes plays pieces by Mendelssohn and Offenbach on his violin; at concerts and the opera he listens to music by Chopin, Sarasate, Wagner and Meyerbeer; he entertains Watson with anecdotes about Paganini; he becomes entangled with opera singer Irene Adler and he publishes a volume on the motets of Orlando di Lasso. Besides this, he ponders the differences between Stradivarius and Amati violins and between pianists and typewriter users. Like a detective, the concert programme precisely reconstructs Holmes’s musical world. The pieces are separated by excerpts read aloud from Doyle’s stories in new Slovenian translations which, in spite of their diversity, connect everything into a meaningful whole.
