Concerts with works by

Alexander Scriabin

Guest performance

Biennale of the Berliner Philharmoniker Piano recital with Alexander Melnikov

Was the world a better place in the Romantic era? Alexander Melnikov explores this question through his piano recital – following the theme of our Biennale entitled Paradise lost? On the threat to nature. With Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, Melnikov leads you through idyllic landscapes and man-made chasms, reveals the poetry of Schumann’s Waldszenen, and shows atmospheric images of nature in Franz Liszt’s piano works. The forest appears here as a place of retreat – from the self and from encroaching industrialisation. By contrast, Alexander Scriabin prophesies the destruction of the world in the grand conflagration of Vers la flamme.

TAMARA STEFANOVICH

In celebration of the Pierre Boulez centenary, Tamara Stefanovich performs the composer’s Second Piano Sonata of 1948, one of his defining early works. Known internationally for her interpretations of modernist and contemporary repertoire, the pianist pairs it with a selection of avant­-garde experiments on the sonata form from the early 20th century—including Scriabin’s mystic “Black Mass,” written in 1911, Busoni’s fantastical, atonal Sonatina seconda, and youthful works by Alban Berg, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Symphonic Concert

Lise de la Salle, photo: Stéphane Gallois Ferenc Liszt was one of those composers who enjoyed pushing boundaries. He even managed to invert the classic chronology of inspiration before creation. In the case of one of his first (and most famous) symphonic poems, entitled Preludes, the idea for the title – alluding to an ode by Alphonse de Lamartine – came when the work was almost finished (it was originally intended as an overture to the cycle The Four Elements). In 1855 an unusual event took place in Weimar, with Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique performed in the presence and with the active participation of both composers. Liszt sat at the piano; Berlioz conducted the orchestra. The first sketches for Liszt’s work date as far back as 1830, so it may have taken as long as 25 years for the composer to complete this concerto, which lasts less than 20 minutes and was unveiled to the public in Weimar. This work is long enough to give the pianist the opportunity to show off their technical skills, as is foreshadowed by the work’s striking opening, with the famous octave theme, concealing – as the anecdote goes – a certain (never revealed) joke on fussy critics. The notion of the extra-musical programme, eagerly taken up by the Romantics, was elevated by Alexander Scriabin to the registers of transcendence and mysticism. His Symphony No. 3, from the early twentieth century, also known as the ‘Divine Poem’, is considered one of the greatest achievements on his path to multimedia expressionist mysteries.

Symphonic Concert

Lise de la Salle, photo: Stéphane Gallois Ferenc Liszt was one of those composers who enjoyed pushing boundaries. He even managed to invert the classic chronology of inspiration before creation. In the case of one of his first (and most famous) symphonic poems, entitled Preludes, the idea for the title – alluding to an ode by Alphonse de Lamartine – came when the work was almost finished (it was originally intended as an overture to the cycle The Four Elements). In 1855 an unusual event took place in Weimar, with Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique performed in the presence and with the active participation of both composers. Liszt sat at the piano; Berlioz conducted the orchestra. The first sketches for Liszt’s work date as far back as 1830, so it may have taken as long as 25 years for the composer to complete this concerto, which lasts less than 20 minutes and was unveiled to the public in Weimar. This work is long enough to give the pianist the opportunity to show off their technical skills, as is foreshadowed by the work’s striking opening, with the famous octave theme, concealing – as the anecdote goes – a certain (never revealed) joke on fussy critics. The notion of the extra-musical programme, eagerly taken up by the Romantics, was elevated by Alexander Scriabin to the registers of transcendence and mysticism. His Symphony No. 3, from the early twentieth century, also known as the ‘Divine Poem’, is considered one of the greatest achievements on his path to multimedia expressionist mysteries.