Programme Guide

The New Year’s Eve Concert with Kirill Petrenko marks the end of a year that, from the very first month, took a different course than expected or hoped for. It was the year in which the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth was celebrated, including in many concerts by the Berliner Philharmoniker, only a fraction of which could be held as planned due to the pandemic. The orchestra and its chief conductor had planned to present a new production of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Easter Festival in Baden-Baden – now at least the overture to the opera (later called the Leonore Overture) would be played at the beginning of the New Year’s Eve Concert. As the story of the eponymous freedom fighter takes place “in a state prison a few miles from Seville”, it was the perfect prelude to a turn of the year with music from and about Spain.

The search for a national musical language of its own intensified in Spain at the end of the 19th century. A foundation was found in folk music. Just as Béla Bartók was responsible for collecting and researching it in Hungary, in Spain it was Felipe Pedrell who could be called the father of Spanish music. Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, Manuel de Falla all learned from him. The latter also removed the touristy trappings from folk music that were already deplored at the time. All of this in the light of French Impressionism, because de Falla matured artistically in Paris, like many of his contemporaries who wanted to write decidedly Spanish music. There they met many times in the decades before and after the turn of the century: from Albéniz and Granados to the pianist Ricardo Viñes – who introduced de Falla to Ravel and Debussy – to Joaquín Rodrigo. Argentinian and Brazilian composers such as Camargo Guarnieri and Heitor Villa-Lobos also spent time there, as did Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s pupil Igor Stravinsky. It was in Paris, the European music capital of the time, that Spanish art music was forged through international exchange.

The concert’s star guest is guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, whose “virtuoso playing, characterised by irresistible exuberance” (The New York Times) has made him an internationally acclaimed soloist.