Season opening 2025: Kirill Petrenko conducts Brahms, Zimmermann and Schumann

“It is not tradition that creates the composer, but the composer that creates tradition,” Bernd Alois Zimmermann noted in 1958, six years after completing his Concerto for Oboe and Chamber Orchestra. The Cologne composer’s understanding of tradition can be seen in his fusion of different trends such as neoclassicism, which was influenced by Stravinsky, and serial music, to which he added elements of jazz, and quotations that were often layered on top of one another (collages, as he called them). Zimmermann, who never overcame the traumatic experiences of his military service, wrote a rebellious work in his Oboe Concerto that foreshadowed postmodernism. The soloist in this performance is Albrecht Mayer, who has been a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker since 1992.

The tradition of the symphony reached new heights with Johannes Brahms’s first contribution to the genre. The pressure of Beethoven’s weighty legacy meant that 14 years passed between his first ideas and its premiere in 1876. Brahms was strongly influenced by Beethoven’s symphonies, both in terms of instrumentation and dramaturgical structure. There are even echoes of motifs from Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth. The expressive spectrum is broad: there is a great, undisguised world-weariness in the tragic mood of the first movement. The symphony’s depiction of inner turmoil as a source of darkly coloured beauty, as well as its intimate chamber music moments, are reminiscent of the tonal language of Brahms’s friend, Robert Schumann.

Schumann’s overture to Lord Byron’s chilling poem Manfred, which opens the concert, shifts between rebellion and resignation. After the death of his lover, the unstable and distracted hero of the title escapes into the world of ghosts – a subject matter that fascinated Schumann from a young age, when he himself was still thinking about a career as a writer. The composer himself described the overture, which premiered to great acclaim in 1852, as one of his “strongest children” – the perfect opening to the Berliner Philharmoniker’s 2025/26 season.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Kirill Petrenko

Albrecht Mayer