Live concerts

Photo: Peter Adamik

Hector Berlioz wrote countless love letters to actress Harriet Smithson – none were ever answered. The Symphonie fantastique became the composer’s outlet: the depiction of an extreme love drama in which the lover is murdered and the murderer is executed. The conductor of the spectacular score here is Daniel Barenboim. The programme also includes the flute concertos by Ferruccio Busoni and Jacques Ibert – captivating music which is dynamic, transparent and surprising. The soloist is Emmanuel Pahud, principal flute of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Photo: Peter Adamik

Hector Berlioz wrote countless love letters to actress Harriet Smithson – none were ever answered. The Symphonie fantastique became the composer’s outlet: the depiction of an extreme love drama in which the lover is murdered and the murderer is executed. The conductor of the spectacular score here is Daniel Barenboim. The programme also includes the flute concertos by Ferruccio Busoni and Jacques Ibert – captivating music which is dynamic, transparent and surprising. The soloist is Emmanuel Pahud, principal flute of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Photo: Marco Borggreve

Tugan Sokhiev, music director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, conducts two works that in different ways deserve the attribute “enchanting”. On the one hand there is the graceful ballet Pulcinella, in which Igor Stravinsky enriches 18th century music with his own harmonies and rhythms. Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C major, on the other hand – the work of a 17-year-old! – conveys irresistible youthful energy. In addition, there is Camille Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto, both sonorous and brilliant, with Nicolas Altstaedt as the soloist.

Photo: Marco Borggreve

The family concert "Jingle Bass Rock" brings Christmas cheer and a lot of very deep notes – with the bass instruments of the orchestra taking centre stage. Horn player and presenter Sarah Willis and her orchestral colleagues have brought along a Christmas list for Santa which includes melodies that are otherwise rarely played by double bass, contrabassoon, bass clarinet, tuba and trombone. Look forward to Christmas sounds and works by Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky in a new light.

Photo: Harald Hoffmann/DG

“There are few poets at the piano today – one of them is Seong-Jin Cho,” was the verdict of Simon Rattle after the young Korean made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2017. Now, under the direction of Iván Fischer, he will play Franz Liszt’s rapturous Second Piano Concerto. The programme also includes Antonín Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony. “The melodies pour out of me,” Dvořák wrote during the composition, and indeed this is a work of intoxicating inspiration and energy.

These concerts with chief conductor Kirill Petrenko provide an end to the year under the southern sun. The first stop is Spain, with sparkling ballet music by Manuel de Falla and Joaquín Rodrigo’s delicate Concierto de Aranjuez, featuring star guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas. There is a detour to South America with Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas brasileiras No. 4 and finally the Capriccio espagnol, in which Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov exudes a vibrant southern temperament with Russia colouring.

The National Youth Orchestra is under the Berliner Philharmoniker’s patronage. Its members, all highly talented instrumentalists between ages 14 and 19, gain their first experience in orchestral playing here – and at the highest level. During rehearsals they are coached by professional orchestra musicians. Being in the BJO means experiencing early on how it feels to perform on major concert stages. The annual guest performance in Berlin’s Philharmonie is a particular high point for the young people.

In his third one-act opera, Rachmaninov set a historically authentic marital drama to music: a northern Italian noblewoman was discovered together with her lover by her jealous husband and murdered. This is a symphonically conceived operatic rarity perfectly made for the concert hall, since it can probably have the greatest impact as imaginary theatre. Hopeless tragedy also defines Shakespeare’s drama Romeo and Juliet, based on which Tchaikovsky composed his Overture-Fantasy of the same name. You are invited to discover the two seldom-heard works with Kirill Petrenko as conductor.

On this programme you will experience two great Russian composers flirting with earlier epochs: Igor Stravinsky combines in his ballet Apollon musagète the cheerful light atmosphere of the classical era with the easy-going, urban lifestyle of the 1920s. Dmitri Shostakovich, on the other hand, composed his Fifth Symphony in 19th-century aesthetics of sound, ostensibly as a homage to socialism. But his music has a certain ambiguity: “The rejoicing is forced under threat,” the composer wrote. “One would have to be a complete fool not to hear that.”

Photo: Monika Rittershaus

“There’s this special moment when you truly feel the music and we all become one connected whole”, Daniil Trifonov waxes enthusiastical in an interview for the Digital Concert Hall. Since his debut in 2016, he has repeatedly bestowed such moments on the Philharmonic audience. Now he will perform Sergei Prokofiev’s youthful and exuberant Piano Concerto No. 1 with Kirill Petrenko in Berlin for the first time. Also on the programme: a première by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp in colourful film music style, a great rarity.

Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Philharmonic Biennale: Kirill Petrenko brings the 1920s to life again with an early work by Kurt Weill. The influence of Liszt, Mahler and Strauss on Weill can be heard in his rarely performed First Symphony. The music is captivating, brash and brilliant, but also features delicate, chamber music-like passages. We also hear Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, composed in 1927 and set in ancient Greece. Its music is crystal-clear neoclassicism – how could it be otherwise? Two fascinating facets of the “Roaring Twenties”.

The Philharmonie is transformed into the legendary coffee house Moka Efti for one night, when members of the Berliner Philharmoniker play dance music of the 1920s – foxtrots and shimmies, tangos, marches and blues ballads. Ernst Krenek’s Lustige Märsche (Merry Marches) provide the finale – wind music that literally seems to trip over its own feet: highly charged, breathless and wonderfully unconventional.

A work that “really makes you happy”: that is how Igor Levit described Beethoven’s brilliant E flat major Piano Concerto, in which – amid the tension between individual and collective – the orchestra and solo part combine to form an integral whole. In contrast, sections of Prokofiev’s E flat minor Symphony are supposed to sound like “wind sweeping over a churchyard”. The slow middle movement alternates between aggressiveness and lament, while rhythmic interjections in the finale symbolize – in the words of the composer – “the forces of evil”. E flat major versus E flat minor: both works are in good hands with Paavo Järvi.

Photo: Chris Christodoulou

Like the opera Eugene Onegin, which he composed five years earlier, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa is also based on a poem by Alexander Pushkin. The work tells the story of the tragic life and loves of a Ukrainian Cossack commander against the background of events during the reign of Peter the Great. After the opera is heard at the Easter Festival in Baden-Baden, the passionate, dramatic score will be brought to life by an outstanding ensemble of singers at the Philharmonie Berlin.

They belonged to different stylistic periods but nevertheless had a great deal in common: Olivier Messiaen and Anton Bruckner numbered among the leading organists of their day, and both were deeply rooted in the Catholic faith, which considerably influenced their works. Zubin Mehta combines Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, an impressive musical memorial to the dead of both world wars, with Anton Bruckner’s monumental Ninth Symphony. In this work, Bruckner not only sums up his symphonic oeuvre but also bids farewell to this world in a very personal way.

One would never get the idea that virtuosity could be an end in itself with Yefim Bronfman, who has been a world-class pianist for many years. His artistry is always devoted to the work itself – regardless of whether he launches into a hard-hitting thunderstorm of chords or caresses delicate poetic tableaus out of the keys. “With Brahms I think of natural landscapes, mountains, green valleys and beautiful panoramas, of incredible grandeur,” Bronfman says about the composer, whose First Piano Concerto he plays at these concerts.

Kirill Petrenko’s interpretation of music by Mozart will be heard together with Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 during this concert, first in Berlin and afterwards at the European Concert. The annual anniversary concert of the Berliner Philharmoniker takes place at the Sagrada Família in Barcelona for the first time in 2021, with a selection of works tailor-made for the sacred location, including the “Coronation” Mass, the Ave verum and the motet “Exsultate, jubilate”. The Catalan choral society Orfeó Català, founded in 1891, makes its debut with the orchestra at these concerts.

At 16,000 kilometres, Philipp Eversheim had the longest journey. The flutist from Australia was one of the approximately 90 music-loving amateurs who had qualified to participate in the BE PHIL Orchestra in 2018. This project of the Education Programme gave musicians from 30 countries the unique experience of performing Brahms’s First Symphony under Sir Simon Rattle. A highly emotional event for both the participants and the audience. This season there will be a revival of the BE PHIL Orchestra – with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and chief conductor Kirill Petrenko at the podium.

“Each of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies has a different philosophy, builds a different world,” Kirill Petrenko says in an interview for the Digital Concert Hall. After the Fourth and the Sixth, he now conducts the Ninth, the composer’s last completed symphony, with the Berliner Philharmoniker. A work which makes a radical break with tradition, points the way to modernism and thus pushes open the door to a different world. Mahler conceived the cosmos of this work as fragile, fragmentary and episodic – a grand farewell to youth, love, life.

It is “a masterpiece, a musical volcano that erupts for sixty minutes of tragic intensity and leaves us with only one desire: to hear it again.” That is how Zoltán Kodály described Béla Bartók’s only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. Composed in 1911, the one-act work is a brilliantly orchestrated symbolic psychological drama that takes us deep into the emotional world of the fin de siècle. “What do you see?” Bluebeard asks his bride Judith, who wants to open the seven doors of the Duke’s past. Susanna Mälkki conducts this musical psychoanalysis, which makes listeners shudder.

Sir Simon Rattle returns to the podium of the Berliner Philharmoniker with a major work by his countryman Edward Elgar. The Dream of Gerontius describes the journey of the soul of a dead man on its way to the next world. The work was composed in 1900, one year after Sigmund Freud published his epochal The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream as the gateway to the subconscious. In Elgar’s version, which is deeply indebted to the fin de siècle, the dream appears in the form of a comforting meditation on death.

The early 20th century was not only influenced by avant-garde concepts but was also characterized by an unbridled passion for intoxicating sounds. Alan Gilbert, chief conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, demonstrates that in this programme. We can almost feel the gentle breeze that Anton Webern evokes in his impressionist early work Im Sommerwind (In the Summer Wind). And Arnold Schoenberg clearly took great pleasure in intensifying the colours of Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1, drawing on all the orchestra’s resources. Unsuk Chin’s iridescent, sensuous Piano Concerto will be heard between the two works, with Sunwook Kim as soloist.

“Conducting is a good profession to grow old in, because it’s always a challenge, and you need challenges when you get older,” said Herbert Blomstedt, born in 1927, who is continuing his long-standing collaboration with the Berliner Philharmoniker with undiminished energy and vitality. On this programme Sibelius’s dark, mist-shrouded Fourth Symphony is contrasted with Brahms’s Third. Between them, a rarity will be heard: the solemn Intermezzo from the cantata Sången (The Song), composed in 1926 by the Swedish late Romantic composer Wilhelm Stenhammar.

Jean-Christophe Spinosi’s artistic home is music of the 17th and 18th centuries. He also appears as an opera conductor, with acclaimed interpretations of works by Mozart and Rossini. For his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker Spinosi has put together a varied programme including two works from the Baroque period, a symphony from the Viennese Classical School and Romantic bel canto. Philippe Jaroussky is also at home in this repertoire and contributes arias by Vivaldi and Rossini in his brilliant countertenor.

At his debut with the orchestra in March of 2019 listeners could experience the presence, physicality and enthusiasm with which multi-percussionist Martin Grubinger executed the solo part in Peter Eötvös’s percussion concerto Speaking Drums. He virtuosically elicited a wealth of timbres from his arsenal of instruments – from eruptive cascades of sound to delicate bell tones. At the close of the concert season in the Waldbühne the percussion star returns to the Berliner Philharmoniker: pure rhythm under the stars.