Live concerts

Simon Rattle is one of the outstanding Haydn conductors of our time. To open his last season as chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, he presents Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, which combines groundbreaking harmonies, humorous tone painting and powerful choruses to form a spectacular cosmic panorama. The excellent ensemble of soloists includes tenor Mark Padmore – the orchestra’s Artist in Residence this season.

The works of this evening with Susanna Mälkki look both back to the past and forward to the future. For example, Béla Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, with soloist Gil Shaham, is in the tradition of Beethoven and Brahms but also experiments with the twelve-tone technique. Jean Sibelius’s Second Symphony, on the other hand, combines echoes of Tchaikovsky with innovative form, while Ferruccio Busoni’s Tanz-Walzer conjures up the atmosphere of a coffee house.

Marek Janowski is regarded as the perfect embodiment of the Kapellmeister tradition and a master of late-Romantic repertoire, and this programme with Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and preludes from Pfitzner’s Palestrina emphasizes these qualities. The special charm of both works is the way they look to the past: Pfitzner evokes the world of the Renaissance, while Bruckner immerses himself in a medieval age full of knights and sounds of the forest.

The transition to Modernism is one of the most exciting phases in musical history. In this concert, works by Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, Claude Debussy and Albert Roussel reveal the richness of late Romanticism combined with originality and pioneering spirit. Alain Altinoglu, the “sensitive magician of timbre” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), makes his debut conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker with Máté Szűcs as the soloist in Bartók’s Viola Concerto.

In the 19th century, many regarded the symphony as obsolete. However, the genre continued to be impressively alive, as Daniele Gatti, chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, demonstrates in this concert. The programme includes Johannes Brahms’s lyrically melodious yet highly innovative Second Symphony and Paul Hindemith’s symphony Mathis der Maler, a sumptuous-sounding play on Baroque forms.

Delicate melancholy and lyrical sensuousness characterise the two solo concertos on this programme with Simon Rattle, Mitsuko Uchida and Amihai Grosz. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seems to reflect on his life in his last piano concerto, while William Walton’s Viola Concerto is dominated by the dark tone of the solo instrument. As a counterpoint, the concert closes with Zoltán Kodály’s humorously grotesque Háry János Suite.

The hero in Leoš Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen is not a princess or a knight but an animal of the forest. This is a unique piece of music theatre in other respects as well, such as its magically luminous music, its poetry and its comedy. Simon Rattle presents the work together with star director Peter Sellars, with whom he has already realised many exciting projects, including their acclaimed interpretations of Bach’s Passions.

Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem is a powerful, solemn work, yet its message shows the utmost compassion. While the horrors of the last judgement are the focus in traditional requiem settings, Brahms’s work sings sensitively of sorrow and consolation in the face of death. The conductor of this performance is Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director designate of the Met in New York.

The B minor Mass is Johann Sebastian Bach’s legacy to vocal music: a cosmos of all the forms and styles that make his sacred works so rich. There are arias of dance-like lightness as well as austere Renaissance singing, ingeniously constructed fugues and jubilant choruses. In this concert the work is performed under the baton of Ton Koopman, a conductor, organist and harpsichordist who is one of the great Bach interpreters of our time.

Performances of Stravinsky have been among the highlights of the Rattle era with the Berliner Philharmoniker. In this concert Sir Simon presents the ballet Petrushka. This tragic love story of a puppet brought to life combines the nostalgic atmosphere of a Russian fair with an innovative musical language. Rachmaninov’s late-Romantically tinged Third Symphony and the premiere of a short work by Unsuk Chin complete the programme.

It is almost inconceivable today that Gustav Mahler’s works were long marginalised in musical life. Bernard Haitink, who has an exceptionally fine feel for the fragmented nature of this music, is one of the conductors who brought about the Mahler renaissance in the 1960s. Mahler, says Haitink, “has always troubled me because he doesn’t validate you”. In this concert, he conducts Mahler’s farewell to the world, the Ninth Symphony.

Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony has the same organ-like power as his later works – but is still overshadowed by them. Bruckner himself was never entirely satisfied with the symphony and revised it several times. This concert conducted by Herbert Blomstedt offers a rare opportunity to discover the first version. Maria João Pires, famous for her sensitive touch, opens the programme with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23.

Ludwig van Beethoven regarded the Missa solemnis as “the best of his sacred works”. In this complex work, magnificent praise to God is as important as the gentle humanist message. On top of this there is the driving energy that we know from Beethoven’s symphonies. The concert is conducted by Christian Thielemann, who has given impressive performances of many great choral works with the Berliner Philharmoniker.

An unhappy love affair inspired Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which is characterised by extraordinary tenderness and emotional depth. The soloist is Vilde Frang, who made her debut with the Philharmoniker at the 2016 European Concert and impressed the audience with her passionate, singing tone. Conductor Iván Fischer also presents excerpts from Mendelssohn’s magical, gossamer-light music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

With her flexible, slender but darkly timbred mezzo-soprano, Joyce DiDonato has already delighted audiences at the Philharmonie on several occasions. Now she is the star guest at Sir Simon Rattle’s side during the New Year’s Eve Concert, singing Richard Strauss’s lavishly beautiful orchestral songs. The programme also includes works by Dvořák, Stravinsky, Bernstein and Shostakovich – full of virtuosity, gracefulness and humour.

Sir Antonio Pappano, music director of London’s Royal Opera House and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, returns to the Berliner Philharmoniker after a 12-year absence. He presents a colourful programme that contrasts delicate French music by Ravel and Duparc with the brutal power of Russian works by Mussorgsky and Scriabin. The vocal soloist is Véronique Gens.

Appearances by Seiji Ozawa, honorary member of the Berliner Philharmoniker, have been a rarity in recent years – making it an even greater pleasure that he is conducting the second half of this concert. The programme features a work of imagination, charm and humour: Maurice Ravel’s short opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges. The first part of the concert centres around 1st concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley, who plays works by Mozart and Saint-Saëns.

In this concert, Mariss Jansons, a celebrated interpreter of the Romantic repertoire, reveals the entire musical and emotional range of this epoch. On the one hand, the wild virtuosity of Schumann’s rapturous Piano Concerto, on the other, the deeply religious grandeur of Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony. The piano soloist is Daniil Trifonov, who combines sensational technique with sensitivity and maturity of expression.

This programme of music from north-eastern Europe is wonderfully austere, at times melancholy, at times brutal. We hear the mythical sounds of Jean Sibelius’s tone poem Tapiola, the industrial power of Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Symphony and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto, which alternates between passion and disenchanted sadness. Dima Slobodeniouk makes his conducting debut with the orchestra; the violin soloist is Baiba Skride.

Dark tones in every shade dominate this concert with Zubin Mehta and Leonidas Kavakos. For example, Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, written in memory of the 19-year-old Manon Gropius, is one of the most poignant works of Modernism. Anton Webern’s delicate Passacaglia was written with the death of the composer’s own mother still fresh in his mind. Antonín Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony is also unusually acerbic and demonic.

Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto demands everything from the soloist: tremendous interval leaps, awkward fingerings, breakneck tempos and richly nuanced expressiveness. Michael Barenboim presents all of this in his debut with the Philharmoniker. Zubin Mehta also conducts two colourful works in which Ravel adapts the cultural heritage of other European countries: the Viennese Waltz in La Valse and an ancient love story in Daphnis et Chloé.

In 1964, Daniel Barenboim made his acclaimed debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker playing Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Now, with Simon Rattle as conductor, he again devotes himself to this fascinating piece in which the piano is featured as an unrelenting percussion instrument. The other works on the programme are also marked by energetic urgency: Janáček’s Sinfonietta with its striking fanfares and Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances.

Richard Strauss was not only a master of orchestration but an enthusiastic mountaineer as well. Thus, it is not surprising that in his last symphonic poem he depicted a hike in the Alps – vivid and haunting, with an endless palette of tonal colours. Conductor Daniel Harding and bass-baritone Gerald Finley also present familiar Schubert songs in rarely heard orchestral arrangements by Brahms and Reger.

Richard Wagner called his Parsifal a “A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage”, and in fact the term opera would be quite inappropriate. It does not deal with intrigues or romantic entanglements but with Wagner’s central metaphysical preoccupation of redemption, for which he wrote scintillating, intoxicating music of incomparable allure. Simon Rattle conducts the work with an outstanding cast of singers, including Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme.

Photo: Stefan Rabold

Kirill Petrenko, chief conductor designate of the Berliner Philharmoniker, presents two sonorous rarities: Anatoly Lyadov’s iridescent tone poem The Enchanted Lake and Franz Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony. The latter is a gently flowing work in the tradition of Anton Bruckner with a powerful funeral march as the highlight. Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, on the other hand, played here by Yuja Wang, is a cheerful and virtuoso work.

Mozart’s C minor Mass is one of the most beautiful works of sacred music ever composed. Choruses of archaic power strikingly alternate with graceful solos, which are perhaps so inspired because Mozart wrote one of the soprano parts for his wife Constanze. Conductor Daniel Harding devotes the rest of the concert to the secular Mozart with the brief, exuberant Symphony No. 32 and two expressive concert arias.

Mozart was a great fan of the then still new clarinet. He composed a splendid concerto, his last work in that genre, for this instrument, whose tone closely resembles the sound of the human voice. The performers in this concert are Alan Gilbert and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s principal clarinet Wenzel Fuchs. The programme also includes Thomas Ades’s highly original Three Studies from Couperin and Debussy’s shimmering Images pour orchestra.

According to the London Times, violinist Janine Jansen is simply “incapable of a dull moment”. In this concert, she plays Sibelius’s popular Violin Concerto, a darkly timbred work whose free, rhapsodic form requires highly creative skill. Paavo Järvi also conducts Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony, which reflects the horrors of the Stalin era with brooding resignation and grotesque savagery.

Tugan Sokhiev, chief conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre, conducts two of the most popular works of the Russian repertoire at this concert, which opens with Prokofiev’s ardent Symphony No. 1, inspired by the First Viennese School. In contrast, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition depicts Russian scenes and legends with incomparable atmospheric and musical intensity. The soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is Yefim Bronfman.

Incredibly successful in its time but largely forgotten today, Robert Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri was described by the composer as an “oratorio for cheerful people”. For many years, Simon Rattle has championed this both lyrical and innovative work, which he says has given him an entirely new perspective on Schumann. Following a first performance in 2009, he conducts it again with an ensemble of outstanding soloists.

Simon Rattle is certain that if Anton Bruckner had lived only two months longer, he would have been able to complete the finale of his Ninth Symphony. In a sensational concert in 2011, Rattle presented a reconstruction of “monolithic, threatening presence” (Gramophone magazine), based on Bruckner’s extensive sketches. As a central work of the Rattle era, the completed symphony can now be heard again.

This concert is almost a condensed retrospective of the Rattle era. For example, Sir Simon’s enthusiasm for contemporary music is revealed in the premiere of a short work by Jörg Widmann; in Lutosławski’s Third Symphony, on the other hand, he once again shows what imaginative music the 20th century has left behind, and finally, Rattle’s continuous work on the great classics of the repertoire is represented by Brahms’s First Symphony.

On 14 November 1987, a promising conductor made his Berliner Philharmoniker debut with Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: Simon Rattle. In retrospect Rattle says, “I felt that I was finding my voice on that day.” Mahler’s multifaceted work is now again on the programme when Sir Simon appears for the last time as chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker in the Philharmonie. The wheel comes full circle.

An era is about to come to an end for the Berliner Philharmoniker. With this concert at the Waldbühne, Sir Simon Rattle’s tenure as chief conductor of the orchestra ends after 16 years. It is a colourful, sparkling farewell – with works by Gershwin, Fauré, Khachaturian and Respighi. The star guest is Sir Simon’s wife, mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, who sings excerpts from Joseph Canteloube’s charming Chants d’Auvergne.