Programme Guide

There are conductors who, with advancing years, gradually pare back their repertoire. And then there was Claudio Abbado, who tirelessly introduced exquisite rarities to the public at his guest appearances in Berlin – as was the case in this concert featuring works by Schubert, Schoenberg and Brahms.

The concert opens with rarely heard orchestral arrangements of three lieder by Franz Schubert. The beauty and independent substance of the original piano accompaniments enjoy recurring praise, so it will be particularly appealing to hear these interpreted by the Berliner Philharmoniker. With Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder we then encounter original orchestral lieder, a work which proved to be this artist’s greatest success. The concert then closes with Johannes Brahms’s cantata Rinaldo which has never been performed before by the Berliner Philharmoniker and gives us an idea of what an opera by this composer might have sounded like.

The evening’s soloists are among the new star of the classical music scene. A contemporary review in the Times wrote: “Among young mezzo-sopranos, Christianne Stotijn is in a class apart”, and the year before, critics polled by Opernwelt named tenor shooting star Jonas Kaufmann “Singer of the Year”.