Programme Guide

Daniel Harding, who began his career as Sir Simon Rattle’s assistant with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra before assisting Claudio Abbado with the Berliner Philharmoniker, has placed Antonín Dvořák’s passionate Concert Overture Othello at the beginning of these Philharmoniker concerts – an ideal “opener”, followed by an exciting premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s new violin concerto. That’s because Lindberg is considered among the most virtuoso orchestral composers of the present day: “It is not about making a manifesto. Music is something which is about emotion! It is an experience.” The soloist is violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann, who has many contemporary works in his repertoire: “As violinist I would like to bring to life the new ideas that a composer from our time has brought forth.”

After the interval, Daniel Harding conducts the Boulez classic Mémoriale (... explosante-fixe ... Originel) for flute and eight instruments, in which the soundscape broken like a prism into the most varied instrumental colours leads to silence at the end. The programme ends with Robert Schumann’s Second Symphony, a piece which consistently heads for its triumphant Finale. The successful premiere took place on 5 November 1847: “In this work,” the journalist Alfred Dörffel wrote in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, “the composer reached a new high point in his oeuvre.”