Live concerts

Photo: Stephan Rabold

In this concert, Kirill Petrenko presents three impassioned symphonic poems from Russia. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is represented by two tragic love stories: the fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet – the 29-year-old composer’s first masterpiece – and the symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini. Unfortunately, Sergei Rachmaninov’s opera on the same subject, which was originally planned for this concert, cannot be performed due to the corona pandemic; in its place, we will hear the composer’s mysterious and sombre Isle of the Dead.

Photo: Stephan Rabold

In this concert, Kirill Petrenko presents three impassioned symphonic poems from Russia. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is represented by two tragic love stories: the Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet – the 29-year-old composer’s first masterpiece – and the symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini. Unfortunately, Sergei Rachmaninov’s opera on the same subject, which was originally planned for this concert, cannot be performed due to the corona pandemic; in its place, we will hear the composer’s mysterious and sombre Isle of the Dead.

Photo: Pablo Faccinetto

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”, as Daniil Trifonov says enthusiastically in an interview for the Digital Concert Hall. Now he will perform Sergei Prokofiev’s youthful and exuberant Piano Concerto No. 1 with Kirill Petrenko. Also on the programme: a world premiere by the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, plus Josef Suk’s tone poem A Summer’s Tale, which combines Bohemian flavouring with shimmering Impressionism.

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”.

Photo: Simon Pauly

“I only conduct pieces that I think I have something to say with,” says Donald Runnicles. As part of our online festival “Die Goldenen Zwanziger (“The Golden Twenties”), the general music director of Deutsche Oper Berlin presents three works from operas written in the 1920s whose music reflects the disparate attitudes to life of the time: Schreker’s Schatzgräber, Berg’s Wozzeck and Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. The concert opens with the prelude to d’Albert’s opera Tiefland, a tale of jealousy set among Spanish farmers in the Pyrenees, which premiered in 1903.

Photo: Stephan Rabold

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.