Kirill Petrenko and Daniil Trifonov

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”.

Following Daniil Trifonov’s debut in 2016, the Tagesspiegel wrote of “moments of magical connection with the Philharmoniker”. Here he performs Sergei Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto together with Kirill Petrenko. The young Prokofiev played his own composition to mark the highly successful completion of his piano studies. In contrast to the provocatively modern Second Concerto, the First, according to Prokofiev, is characterised by the “pursuit of external splendour and a certain football character”. He is most likely referring to the urgently jubilant opening theme. 

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

Daniil Trifonov