Live concerts

Photo: Sebastian Hänel

Daniel Stabrawa, 1st concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker since 1986, is one of the orchestra’s most familiar faces. He was supposed to appear as both soloist and conductor with the Berliner Philharmoniker in June, but the concert had to be cancelled due to the corona crisis. In this new episode of the Berlin Phil Series, Panufnik’s Violin Concerto has been retained from the originally planned programme, accompanied by a string ensemble. Daniel Stabrawa can also be heard as a chamber musician in a trio by Dvořák and – in an archive recording – as concertmaster in Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony.

Chief conductor Kirill Petrenko will kick off the 2020/21 concert season with a programme that brings together three focuses of his work with the Berliner Philharmoniker across the seasons: Felix Mendelssohn’s music, cultivating the orchestra’s core repertoire with Johannes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, and music from the close of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries with Anton Webern’s Opus 1. The programme will also be performed on the subsequent festival tour to Salzburg, Lucerne and London.

Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony begins with one of the most famous trumpet soli in music literature. It is followed by a 70-minute drama of the worlds: the music rises up, falls down, finally literally exploding in heroic passages. Soft string sounds dominate in the famous Adagietto. But that is just the quiet before the storm of the Finale. This ambiguous quality can also be found in Olga Neuwirth’s music. Her humorous and demonic worlds of sound will be interpreted for the first time by the Berliner Philharmoniker in the European premiere of Keyframes for a Hippogriff.

After performing Josef Suk’s Asrael Symphony with the Berliner Philharmoniker in season 2019/2020, chief conductor Kirill Petrenko is now programming another major work by the Czech composer: the large-scale symphonic poem A Summer’s Tale. Like Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, premiered in 1936, where Frank Peter Zimmermann can be heard as the soloist, the work is shaped by its composer’s dramatic personal experiences: autobiographical music that casts a spell on the listeners.

Double debut with two rising stars: Lahav Shani, music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, who has succeeded Zubin Mehta, and pianist Francesco Piemontesi, who is considered one of the most interesting Mozart interpreters of his generation due to his sensitive, nuanced playing. The main symphonic work is Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande: a late Romantic orchestral drama that is one of the most significant fin-de-siècle musical works. The story of the fateful entanglement of two unhappy lovers is told with passion and fervour.

Besides Ludwig van Beethoven, the music world is celebrating another composer’s anniversary this year: 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of Max Bruch’s death. We are paying him tribute with this programme, on which Noah Bendix-Balgley, 1st Concertmaster, will interpret Bruch’s lastingly popular First Violin Concerto as soloist with the orchestra. On the second half of the concert, you can hear a contemporary of Bruch’s, namely Anton Bruckner. Grappling with Bruckner’s music is a lifelong theme for conductor Marek Janowski.

Paul Hindemith is a composer close to Tabea Zimmermann’s heart. It thus comes as no surprise that as Artist in Residence she will perform his viola concerto Der Schwanendreher. The work owes its peculiar title to a German folk song whose melody is the basis for the third movement. Igor Stravinsky’s colourful ballet music Petrushka is based, in contrast, on Russian traditions of puppet theatre. And for Unsuk Chin, the composer originally from South Korea now living in Berlin who characterises her music as a “play of light and colours”, dreams constitute a vital source of inspiration.

Prometheus is the figure of light of the Enlightenment and at the same time emblem of its impossibility. With Haydn’s, Beethoven’s and Liszt’s adaptations of this myth, Prometheus’s heroic commitment to humanity by stealing fire and his hubris as a disruptive element of social order are both illuminated and interpreted on this programme.

A masterpiece of Czech romantic music, Bedřich Smetana’s Má Vlast (My Homeland), can be heard at this concert. The cycle of six symphonic poems, composed within five years, is rarely performed in its entirety; one usually hears only The Moldau, the best-known part. In terms of content, Smetana is dealing with the myths of his Czech homeland in addition to its landscape. You can look forward to experiencing how Daniel Barenboim, who has been conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker for 51 years by now, will interpret the entire cycle.

Musical stories constitute the centre of this concert with chief conductor Kirill Petrenko. We encounter Till Eulenspiegel, whose merry pranks Richard Strauss depicts humorously and expertly in his symphonic poem of the same name. In Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), in contrast, Strauss tells about himself – and his conflicts with his critics. The quiet of a park collides in Charles Ives’s Central Park in the Dark with the sounds of the nocturnal city. The ground-breaking novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut in turn inspired Andrew Norman to his work Unstuck.

“My favourite instrument”, Witold Lutosławski professed, “is the orchestra itself”. It comes as no surprise that his most popular piece is a virtuoso work for just this “instrument”: the Concerto for Orchestra, which, with its vibrant colours and folkloristic vitality, is considered one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. The Symphonie fantastique also calls for top orchestral performances. It sets the scene with an enormous instrumental ensemble around its subject: the dream of an opium high, fluctuating between autobiography and fiction, with rapture, effects and sound spectacle.

When Camille Saint-Saëns concluded his Third Symphony in 1886, he was sure: “What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again.” The work is known as the “Organ Symphony” because Saint-Saëns added the “queen of the instruments” as a special feature to what was already a large orchestra. Dvořák composed his Cello Concerto, which is among his most popular works, a few years after Saint-Saëns’s stroke of genius. The two compositions enrich the season focus with music from the fin de siècle in a particularly effective manner.

Actually, eleven-year old Andris Nelsons was only looking for music for meditation when he came across Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, where he was immediately enthusiastic about its mystical atmosphere of nature. Now the Latvian conductor – today one of the leading Mahler interpreters of our time – is presenting the composer’s first symphonic work with the Berliner Philharmoniker. In addition, we will hear Sofia Gubaidulina’s meditative violin concerto Offertorium, inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach. The soloist is Baiba Skride, who for many years has been one of Andris Nelsons’s artistic partners.

The sound of Santa Claus is low, sonorous and dark. Fortunately, the orchestra deploys many instruments that can lend him musical form: double bass, double bassoon, bass clarinet, tuba and trombone. These low instruments take centre stage at our Christmas concert. Host Sarah Willis, horn player with the Berliner Philharmoniker, will create a great atmosphere, convey interesting facts about the bass instruments in an entertaining way, and get us in the mood for Christmas, together with members of the orchestra.

Seong-Jin Cho says his favourite pianists include Radu Lupu and Krystian Zimerman, and you believe it when hearing his effortless, elastic piano playing. The interpretations of the Korean newcomer captivate us by combining a broad palette of timbres with flawless technique, profound thoughts and emotional expression. This makes him an ideal partner to Iván Fischer, who knows how to take on music of varied origin with stylistic accuracy – from a whirling fairy-tale opera prelude to an homage to nature à la Dvořák.

Be it Andalusian flamenco, which arose in exchange with Moorish traditions, passions unleashed in close contact to the Provence in France, or Latin America’s musical life, which flourishes at the other end of the Atlantic Ocean: the Berliner Philharmoniker’s New Year’s concert will bring the diversity of Spanish music to life. The virtuoso guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas will play Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, and Kirill Petrenko will lead his orchestra into the new year with a programme full of atmosphere consisting of favourites and rediscoveries.

In accordance with one of our season emphases, this evening focuses on Russian music: Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, composed after the composer experienced a phase of radical personal crises, is “unviolinistic”, Leopold Auer, to whom the work is dedicated, once stated. Lisa Batiashvili will make tangible that this is not the case at all. “The inhuman” is the theme of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, completed in 1943: he describes the brutality of war, exposes the empty pomp of military deployments, and finds moving tones for humanity’s sorrow in the face of horrors.

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.”

“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.

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. After the interval, we 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”.

Actor, director and author Simon McBurney is an artistic multitalent. For concert stages in Berlin, Los Angeles and San Francisco he directs a programme that leads us deep into the abysses of the 1920s, particularly in Hindemith’s operatic shocker Murderer, Hope of Women, which is based on a drama by Oskar Kokoschka. It is about sex and dark desires, brutality and murder. McBurney and his artistic team work with techniques such as video projections, thus creating an atmosphere which makes the social and political climate in the time of the Weimar Republic come alive.

Two lesser known masterworks of the Golden Twenties: as Arnold Schoenberg bathed Bach’s monumental Prelude and Fugue in the instrumental colours of a large symphony orchestra in early 1928, Richard Strauss had completed his latest work a few weeks earlier. The cycle Die Tageszeiten (The Times of Day), based on poems by Eichendorff, is in no way inferior to the beauty of the famous Vier letzte Lieder. After the interval the Dante Symphony by Franz Liszt, a composer who admired both Schoenberg and Strauss, offers a musical foretaste of the hereafter.

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.

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.