El Carnaval de los Animales

Concert in San Bartolomé.

Tickets: here.

The Joven Orquesta de Canarias (JOCAN) is back with a new tour to celebrate the arrival of summer with a chamber programme designed to be accessible to all audiences.

Under the baton of Víctor Pablo Pérez, together with a chamber ensemble of 11 young musicians, they will perform The Carnival of the Animals (1886) by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), a suite in fourteen movements that he composed during a holiday in Austria as a kind of musical joke to entertain his friends.

C. Saint Saëns forbade it to be published or performed during his lifetime, with the exception of the movement ‘The Swan’, which he considered serious and beautiful. The work was publicly premiered after his death in 1922 and has since become very popular, for, although it is a humorous work, it is composed with great skill and a profound knowledge of instrumental colour.

In each of these movements, an animal or scene is depicted with a humorous and parodic touch. For example, in the ‘Fossils’ movement, Saint-Saëns parodies himself and others such as Rossini and Offenbach.

As a guiding thread, and as a novelty in the JOCAN, Víctor Lemes, musician and comedian from the Canary Islands, will perform a script to accompany the orchestra in its concerts and act as narrator.

To close the concert programme, El Carnaval de los Animales Canarios will be performed, a continuous composition of the work by Camille Saint-Saëns based on real and fantastic animals of the Canary Islands by the island composers Celia Rivero and Sergio Rodríguez, who were in charge of setting this work to music. This work is a composition commissioned by the Auditorio de Tenerife, as part of its programme for families.