More about this playlist

Since his debut in 2015, François-Xavier Roth has appeared regularly as guest conductor with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Today he is among the conductors with the greatest stylistic flexibility. He already demonstrated his versatility at his Philharmoniker debut with a French programme ranging from the Baroque to the 20th century.

This playlist compiled by the French conductor creates a compact portrait of progressive composing from the late Romantic period to the 21st century. Richard Wagner’s musical drama Tristan und Isolde, which the Philharmoniker performed in concert under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle in 2016, is often described as the beginning of Modernism in music. Arnold Schoenberg, for example, regarded his twelve-tone music as a further development of Wagnerian harmony. Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, which is demanding for performers and listeners alike, gains an astonishing plasticity and liveliness in the performance by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Kirill Petrenko.

In Paul Dukas’s ballet music La Péri, also conducted by Kirill Petrenko, late-Romantic compositional techniques are delightfully combined with an impressionistic use of colour. Pierre Boulez, whose works set standards in the post-World War II music scene, can be heard conducting Igor Stravinsky’s early poetic opera Le Rossignol. And finally, Helmut Lachenmann, an uncompromising avant-gardist of the present, is also represented.