Daniel Harding and Lisa Batiashvili
“For me, my sound is like a voice,” says Lisa Batiashvili, “it reflects the soul of the musician. I want to use it to encourage people to look inside themselves and reflect on their own feelings.” The violinist, who was the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Artist in Residence in the 2023/24 season, has had two opportunities to fulfil this ambition alongside Daniel Harding – at the Europakonzert in her native Georgia, and at this concert at the Philharmonie Berlin. She gives a nuanced and spirited performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, which is framed by Schubert’s Die Zauberharfe overture and Beethoven’s Fifth.
Both Lisa Batiashvili and Daniel Harding have worked with the Berliner Philharmoniker for many years – and in Johannes Brahms’s symphonic Violin Concerto, they show how well they harmonise with each other. The soloist performed the work with “dreamlike technical perfection and depth of feeling that moved the audience to tears” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung).
In 1820, Franz Schubert was commissioned by the Theater an der Wien to compose music for a melodrama based on Georg von Hofmann’s play Die Zauberharfe. “Although the play was insignificant”, reported Schubert’s friend Joseph von Spaun, “the realm of fairies gave the composer’s imagination free rein, and he produced music full of infinitely beautiful melodies and the most marvellous effects”. As the text of the melodrama has been lost, it is no longer possible to pass judgement on its quality. The evocative overture, on the other hand, is a double delight: Schubert actually wanted to use the prelude to his unpublished opera Alfonso and Estrella as further incidental music to Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus in 1823. However, the music for Die Zauberharfe was apparently so much better that it eventually became the Rosamunde overture.
To conclude the programme, Daniel Harding conducts Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C minor, whose concise opening motif is one of the most famous phrases in classical music. In this work, what is referred to as per aspera ad astra is clearly realised: the struggle from darkness to light. Whether the work symbolises the general human struggle with fate or is an homage to the bourgeois revolution, no one can escape its overwhelming power.
@ 2024 Berlin Phil Media Gmbh
Artists
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