Kirill Petrenko conducts “The Miraculous Mandarin” and “Petrushka”

Following Béla Bartók’s The Wooden Prince, Kirill Petrenko turns his attention to Bartók’s ballet suite from The Miraculous Mandarin. As different as the two works are – one an enchanting fairy tale, the other a murderous contemporary drama – they are linked by the juxtaposition of mechanics and humanity: in the Prince ballet, the flesh-and-blood protagonist competes with his wooden counterpart, while in The Miraculous Mandarin, the hectic, noisy rhythms of the big city clash with the Chinese man’s longing for love.

In the ballet, the Mandarin is brought to a girl by her pimps – known as the three tramps. They try several times to kill the wealthy Chinese man in order to rob him. But the Mandarin defies all these violent attacks. Only when the girl embraces him is he able to die – in a moment of ultimate fulfilment and extreme pain.

The theatrical scandal that The Miraculous Mandarin caused at its Cologne premiere in 1926 – mayor Konrad Adenauer subsequently banned the “perverse” play – is reminiscent of the reaction to Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps a good decade earlier. Both works are now considered milestones of Expressionism in music. Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka, which premiered in 1911, emerged from preliminary work on Le Sacre. The composer had “the persistent idea of a puppet that suddenly comes to life and, with the devilish arpeggio of its leaps, exhausts the orchestra’s patience to such an extent that it threatens it with fanfares. This develops into a terrible confusion, which culminates in the painful, lamenting collapse of the poor jumping jack”.

Kirill Petrenko opens this programme of ballet music with Leoš Janáček’s Lachian Dances. Composed around 1888 and revised in 1927, the composer adapted folk dances from Moravian Wallachia into his own idiom.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Kirill Petrenko