Programme Guide

Since 1991, the Berliner Philharmoniker have been giving concerts every year on 1 May to mark the anniversary of their foundation on 1 May 1882. Each year the concert is held in a European centre of culture. To celebrate its 125th anniversary the orchestra decided to remain in its home town.The backdrop for its 2007 concert was the hugely impressive Oberspree Cable Works, one of Berlin’s most important industrial monuments of the late 19th century.

The works on the programme were pieces by Wagner and Brahms dating from the early years of the orchestra: Wagner’s Parsifal received its world première at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1882, and the prelude to Act I was heard at the orchestra’s very first subscription concert in the October of that year. 

Two years later, Brahms appeared with the orchestra as soloist and conductor, and ever since then, the orchestra has had a particularly close rapport with his music and would have no difficulty finding two soloists from within its own ranks to play the solo parts in Brahms’ Double Concerto. For the gala concert in May 2007 they called on the services of two international soloists, the cellist Truls Mørk and the violinist Lisa Batiashvili, who, according to the critic of Der Tagesspiegel, “engaged in a nimble, thoughtful and brilliant dialogue both with each other and with the orchestra. What fine music!” The concert culminated with Brahms’s Fourth Symphony: “Simon Rattle combines Furtwängler’s sense of scale with Karajan’s beauty of tone,” wrote Die Zeit, “winning the audience’s acclaim with this demonstration of its capabilities as a world-class orchestra.”