Asmik Grigorian sings Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff

Sibelius and Tchaikovsky

Sibelius's violin concerto is now the most performed of all violin concertos from the 20th century. Yet its musical language belongs to the late 19th century, and the music is warm and lyrical, dramatic and melancholic. Sibelius, himself a violinist, possibly wrote the concerto he himself would have wanted to play – albeit on a technical level far beyond his own. In this way, the violin concerto can be seen as a farewell to the youthful dreams of a career as a violin virtuoso. It is among the more challenging in the genre, as many violinists have attested.Taking on the challenge is the young award-winning violinist Maria Ioudenitch. In 2021, she won first prize in the prestigious Ysaÿe International Music Competition and the same year also the Tibor Varga International Violin Competition. Maria Ioudenitch was born in Russia but moved to the USA with her family at the age of two.Tchaikovsky composed his fifth symphony during a few summer months in 1888. He had complained about a lack of inspiration in the spring: "Am I burned out? No ideas, no desire?" But the fifth became a vital, emotionally charged, and in many respects brilliant symphony. It premiered under the composer's direction at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in November of the same year.The concert opens with the Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodis's Liguria, music that takes us on a journey between five small fishing villages clinging to the cliffs along Italy's northwest coast.Read more about chief conductor Ryan Bancroft

Paula Murrihy sings Brahms, Mahler and Grieg

The Sunday Morning Concert brings you wonderful and much-loved compositions, performed by top musicians from the Netherlands and abroad. Enjoy the most beautiful music in the morning! You can make your Sunday complete by enjoying a delicious post-concert lunch in restaurant LIER.The Royal Concertgebouw is one of the best concert halls in the world, famous for its exceptional acoustics and varied programme. Attend a concert and have an experience you will never forget. Come and enjoy inspiring music in the beautiful surroundings of the Main Hall or the intimate Recital Hall.

Mozart, Bartók and Tchaikovsky

The slow third movement in the Gran Partita is among the most beautiful and poignant pieces of music Mozart ever wrote. In Milos Forman's film Amadeus, the music is used in a key scene: when Salieri describes the music and realizes that Mozart is a genius. The masterpiece Gran Partita consists of seven movements that alternate between dance-like joy and contemplation. The music is composed for 12 wind instruments and double bass, and is performed by members of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.The other two works in the programme are performed by the orchestra's strings. Divertimento is Italian and means entertainment, diversion. And Béla Bartók's Divertimento for Strings certainly lives up to its name. The music occasionally blossoms into melodic pirouettes, and the lively rhythms are inspired by Bartók's interest in folk music.Mozart was one of Tchaikovsky's great influences, which is understandable when you hear his Serenade. Like in Gran Partita, the music is passionate and sometimes melancholic, but above all overflowing with happiness. Music straight from the heart, as Tchaikovsky himself emphasized. Concertmaster Andrej Power leads the strings of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.

Mozart's Jupiter Symphony and Chen Reiss sings Beethoven

The Sunday Morning Concert brings you wonderful and much-loved compositions, performed by top musicians from the Netherlands and abroad. Enjoy the most beautiful music in the morning! You can make your Sunday complete by enjoying a delicious post-concert lunch in restaurant LIER.The Royal Concertgebouw is one of the best concert halls in the world, famous for its exceptional acoustics and varied programme. Attend a concert and have an experience you will never forget. Come and enjoy inspiring music in the beautiful surroundings of the Main Hall or the intimate Recital Hall.

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Rachmaninoff and Franck

The Sunday Morning Concert brings you wonderful and much-loved compositions, performed by top musicians from the Netherlands and abroad. Enjoy the most beautiful music in the morning! You can make your Sunday complete by enjoying a delicious post-concert lunch in restaurant LIER.The Royal Concertgebouw is one of the best concert halls in the world, famous for its exceptional acoustics and varied programme. Attend a concert and have an experience you will never forget. Come and enjoy inspiring music in the beautiful surroundings of the Main Hall or the intimate Recital Hall.

Cat Power sings Dylan

Under the moniker Cat Power, US musician Chan Marshall has perfected the art of cover songs over the past three decades. With a melancholic, smoky voice, subtle instrumentation, and a minimalist groove, she captures the essence of the songs. Cat Power has now covered one of the most legendary concerts in pop history: Bob Dylan’s 1966 performance at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, which became famous as a live recording mistakenly labeled »Royal Albert Hall«. You could also hear the protests of the audience when Dylan picked up the electric guitar in the second part of the concert, breaking with the purist folk tradition to transition to rock music. Three of her eleven studio albums since 1995 are cover albums, where songs by the Rolling Stones or Lana Del Rey sound as if they were originally by Cat Power. The FAZ referred to this as »everse pop«, describing it as the »re-transformation of mass-produced music into something intimate and idiosyncratic«. Cat Power reinterpreted this concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 2022 and released it as a live album. It is both a tribute to Bob Dylan and a clever reinterpretation of a pop artist who now is reviving Dylan’s legendary concert at the Grand Hall of the Elbphilharmonie as part of the Kampnagel International Summer Festival.

Renée Fleming sings Strauss

It always feels good to make music with friends – and when that friend is soprano Renée Fleming, you just know that something extra-special is on the cards. No introduction is required for one of the LPO’s best-loved guests, the American soprano whose personality lights up the world’s greatest stages and whose voice has been compared to double cream. ‘Unforgettable’ was how one critic described her 2022 Gala with the LPO, and tonight she returns to sing Richard Strauss’s radiant Four Last Songs. Music that never grows old, sung by one of the supreme voices of our time.

Works by Brahms and Tchaikovsky

Sings and whispers. Matilda Lloyd's trumpet

Over the last two centuries, wind instruments were pushed into the background of classical music by strings, which were considered “nobler”. The trumpet is troubled by the stereotype of a “signal” instrument, even though, after all, it would still sing so beautifully in the baroque era. Maybe it is this tradition that the British composer Dani Howard will reference; certainly, we are going to hear the trumpet singing in the lyrical and elevated Legende by George Enescu. Matilda Lloyd has actually sang an entire album with arrangements of operatic arias – it is a must-listen! One of the pieces to be found there is the Song of the rain by Chopin’s friend, the singer and composer Pauline Viardot, taken from her opera The Last Sorcerer. In her Katowice concert, the trumpeter will return to Paris, reaching for arrangements of the well-known works of Debussy and Ravel, as well as for the proud Intrada by Arthur Honegger, in which the trumpet presents itself to us without even the slightest complexes. Adam Suprynowicz Concert duration: approximately 70 minutes

Concertgebouw Orchestra plays Rachmaninoff and Sibelius

Pianist Kirill Gerstein can do it all, having already demonstrated as much with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in works by Rachmaninoff – the Piano Concerto No. 2 and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – as well as Liszt, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich and Adès. Now he tackles the Mount Everest of piano concertos – Rachmaninoff’s Third. Rachmaninoff’s characteristic melancholy always culminates in exuberant finales. The Third Piano Concerto is an uncontested high point of his œuvre: it is not only a virtuoso work, but also a compelling dialogue between piano and orchestra. And the more you hear it, the more it reveals. This also applies to Anna Clyne’s turbulent Fractured Time, the second work on the orchestra’s repertoire by this successful and fascinating composer.And speaking of exuberant finales – the orchestra is performing Jean Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony after the interval. This well-loved symphony is sombre in character, the composer having suffered from deep depression. But during the compositional process, the sun gradually broke through, and the music culminates in a radiant and sublime ending. Sibelius’s symphonies fit Santtu-Matias Rouvali like a glove, and he has been a welcome guest with the Concertgebouw Orchestra since his first appearance in 2020. Like a passionate sculptor, the Finnish conductor moulds the orchestra in changeable shapes and colours – just what Sibelius’s epic music calls for.