François-Xavier Roth and Isabelle Faust

Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas admired Richard Wagner’s music in their youth, resulting in a blend of French flavour and Wagnerian echoes in their early works. François-Xavier Roth demonstrates that with Debussy’s mystical cantata La Damoiselle élue and Dukas’s overture Polyeucte. We also hear Dukas’s most popular symphonic poem, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Soloist for the concert is Isabelle Faust, who performs Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

The Times coined the nickname “Special FX” for François-Xavier Roth. The French maestro has a breathtaking sense for iridescent timbres that are sometimes so remarkable that even orchestral musicians seem surprised.

This guest performance by Roth promises an evening full of special effects, which will be introduced by Paul Dukas’s rarely performed overture Polyeucte inspired by Pierre Corneille’s tragedy of the same name. It is an early work that pays tribute to César Franck as well as to Richard Wagner’s opera Der fliegende Holländer and subtly evokes the ambiguities of late Romanticism. Claude Debussy’s La Damoiselle élue, a “small oratorio with a somewhat mystical character” (Debussy) for soprano (Damoiselle), mezzo-soprano (narrator), women’s choir and orchestra, is also unusually colourful. It is about a deceased woman who looks down on earth and longs for her beloved.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice which follows is probably Dukas’s most famous symphonic poem, based on Goethe’s ballad of the same name. In magical sounds, we recognise here the broom motif, the axe blows and the incantations of the old sorcerer.

A special highlight of the evening: Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto with Isabelle Faust as the soloist – music in which avant-garde refinement of timbre and classical simplicity enter into a sensuous union.

Berliner Philharmoniker

François-Xavier Roth

Isabelle Faust

Anna Prohaska

Adèle Charvet