Kirill Petrenko conducts Suk’s “A Summer’s Tale” and a world premiere

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir found inspiration for her new work Catamorphosis “in the fragile relationship we have with our planet”. The music creates an increasingly fierce vortex that makes the impending catastrophe palpable. Thorvaldsdóttir uses different textures to characterise conflicting forces: “power and fragility, preservation and destruction”. In the end, there is hope that man can find a “balance in and with the world”.

Kirill Petrenko first encountered the music of Josef Suk during his time as a student. He was immediately taken by the Czech composer’s opulent tonal language, in which late Romanticism and Impressionism, symphonic grandeur and Bohemian melodiousness find a unique synthesis. Following his performance of the Asrael Symphony with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2020, he presents here the tone poem A Summer’s Tale.

The cheerful title is deceiving. Although the movement titles of the work describe the course of a summer’s day, its content is more substantial: after the death of his revered father-in-law Antonín Dvořák and his wife Ottilie, Suk had initially expressed his grief in the Asrael Symphony. A Summer’s Tale is the continuation of this artistic mourning work – a musical farewell, which is impressively symbolised in the last section “Night” in particular.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Kirill Petrenko