Programme Guide

Giovanni Antonini’s daring, enthralling and breathtaking music-making is consistently full of energy, and focused through the full range of dynamic possibilities and rhythmic variations. With the Berliner Philharmoniker, the original sound specialist and long-time director of the Baroque ensemble Il Giardino Armonico has so far presented music by Bach as well as the Classical: Haydn and Mozart – and this evening is no exception. The programme includes the famous Trauer Symphony from Joseph Haydn’s Sturm und Drang period, in which the composer cultivated an uncompromisingly dramatic and highly emotional style: only in the trio of the minuet and in the slow movement does the minor lighten to major in this emotionally charged tour de force. The second Haydn symphony of the evening (No. 54) also has an extravagance about it. Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon speculates – not without reason – that parts of the music were taken from one of the numerous works that were performed under Haydn’s direction on Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s opera stage. The dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos dates from Haydn’s London period – a work in which the eponymous Cretan princess is overcome by the realisation that she has been abandoned by her lover Theseus. This work marks the debut of soprano Fatma Said.

Giovanni Antonini and the Berliner Philharmoniker then perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s entr’actes for Tobias Freiherr von Gebler’s play Thamos, King of Egypt: another highly expressive piece of music that sheds psychological light on the text and which Mozart himself highly valued.