Passion and Belief

Through the centuries, a recurrent role often held by music was to be a mean for catharsis. Indeed, as musical pieces often reflect on human love, love-longing, and the primacy of emotions, the listener may relate to them intensely, often resulting in a feeling of renewal and restoration. Few composers expressed their emotions as intensely and raw as Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, and the passion and suffering that can be found in their music, while bearing a tragic element, make their works some of the most relatable and striking pieces of music written in the western classical music history. However, while the expression of feelings was a key and almost systematic element in Romantic music, with Tchaikovsky's and Sibelius' evidently being no exception, the concept itself can be found in equally intense ways in all periods of music history. Some of the most extraordinary and ardent depictions of human emotions rest to this day in Baroque music, while the music of our times makes no exception with its treatment of sentiments, although sometimes in a more esoteric manner. As a diachronic element through music history, passion, love, melancholy, grief, despair, are aligned in the following program, with all the pieces sharing the incredible intensity of their expression.