Programme Guide

The fall of the Berlin Wall coincided in many people’s minds with the fall of another geographical wall, when they were reminded of an item of information that they had acquired at school, namely, the belief that Europe extends as far east as the Urals. The Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle were keen to promote this expansion of a European perspective, which is why they gave their 2008 European Concert in the Great Hall of Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory.

The orchestra had first performed in this venerable hall in 1969, and in spite of their extremely cool reception by the Soviet authorities, their concert had proved to be a milestone in their history: at the end Dmitri Shostakovich had personally thanked Herbert von Karajan for his interpretation of his Tenth Symphony. Some forty years later Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements ensured that the concert had a Russian dimension, as did Vadim Repin as the soloist in Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G minor. Even though he had not studied at the Moscow Conservatory, Repin must have felt a certain frisson that evening when standing on exactly the same spot as David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan had done before him.

The concert ended with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. In the spring of 2008 Rattle and the Philharmoniker had performed their first joint Beethoven cycle in Berlin, before taking these works on tour throughout the Baltic and Scandinavia. According to the critic of the Berlin Tagesspiegel, these performances were “full of spirit, without false emotion, offering a crystalline and yet fully integrated sound: Beethoven for the 21st century”.