Keywords: Special Concert, Symphony Concert, Vocal Music
| Anna Lucia Richter | Mezzo-Soprano |
| Gürzenich-Orchester Köln | |
| Thomas Guggeis | Conductor |
| Blumine op. 46 Symphonic movement (1884) | Gustav Mahler |
| Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1887-98) | Gustav Mahler |
| Symphony No. 6 in C major D 589 (1817/18) | Franz Schubert |
These events are similar in terms of concept, place, musicians or the program.
Haydn's "Missa in angustiis," his only mass in a minor key, reflects the turbulent times of the Napoleonic Wars. Beethoven's Symphony No. 2, written as his deafness began, is surprisingly playful and full of contrast. Mozart's Symphony No. 1, composed at the age of eight, reveals a composer brimming with energy, imagination, and original ideas.
Haydn's "Missa in angustiis," his only mass in a minor key, reflects the turbulent times of the Napoleonic Wars. Beethoven's Symphony No. 2, written as his deafness began, is surprisingly playful and full of contrast. Mozart's Symphony No. 1, composed at the age of eight, reveals a composer brimming with energy, imagination, and original ideas.
Attracting around 8,000 visitors on site and considerably more via TV and radio, Klassik am Odeonsplatz is one of the highlights of every BRSO season. For this year’s program, Sir Simon Rattle has chosen excerpts from Wagner’s Walküre, of which Brahms probably would have approved. In his opinion, there were “wonderful things” in it, and said about one performance: “In the Second Act, I drink a glass of beer, deliberately lie down for half an hour, and afterwards I feel refreshed again.” Brahms wrote his Second Symphony during a summer holiday on Lake Wörthersee. It’s the perfect piece for a wonderful Munich open-air concert – possibly with a glass of beer to celebrate the new BRSO chief conductor’s first season.
26 years old, and just married to a woman who is an avowed Fennoman (a Finland enthusiast), young Jean Sibelius starts composing his first tone poem. Rather than following a specific musical road map, his En saga is more of a fairy tale of mystic landscapes. It shows vast surfaces of sound, subdued melancholy, and here and there, cheerful trolls pop up for a perky little dance. Incidentally, the first sketches to this piece were made in Austria, where Sibelius, the composer with the Swedish accent, spent his time in Viennese coffee houses, reading the Finnish national epic, the Kalewala. »I never felt more Finnish than in Vienna, Italy and Paris.« In Kaija Saariaho’s case, the musical approach to the five poems by her compatriot Pentti Saarikoski had little to do with Finnish national romanticism but more with the urge to explore the art of composing. Saariaho, who passed away in 2023, had originally set the work for soprano and piano, and the Gürzenich Orchestra now examines the orchestral version. In the very first poem, The Face of Nature, the composer’s musical language builds bridges to Jean Sibelius, while Sumun läpi – Through the mist – explores impenetrable, mysterious worlds of sound. The soloist in this performance is a longtime artistic companion of Saariaho, the singer Anu Komsi. Whoever tries to spot British sounding melodies in Dvořák’s »English« symphony, his 8th, will most certainly be disappointed. The Czech composer merely switched to a British publisher for this buoyant work, hence the misleading title. The symphony is bold, and vigorously joyful. It has an introspective beginning, but after less than a minute, the atmosphere takes a turn for the jubilant, culminating in a finale with festive, beaming fanfares. Antonín Dvořák is on the fast lane to success: »You want to know what I do? My head is full – if only one could write everything down immediately! […] The ease exceeds all expectations and the melodies just keep coming.
26 years old, and just married to a woman who is an avowed Fennoman (a Finland enthusiast), young Jean Sibelius starts composing his first tone poem. Rather than following a specific musical road map, his En saga is more of a fairy tale of mystic landscapes. It shows vast surfaces of sound, subdued melancholy, and here and there, cheerful trolls pop up for a perky little dance. Incidentally, the first sketches to this piece were made in Austria, where Sibelius, the composer with the Swedish accent, spent his time in Viennese coffee houses, reading the Finnish national epic, the Kalewala. »I never felt more Finnish than in Vienna, Italy and Paris.« In Kaija Saariaho’s case, the musical approach to the five poems by her compatriot Pentti Saarikoski had little to do with Finnish national romanticism but more with the urge to explore the art of composing. Saariaho, who passed away in 2023, had originally set the work for soprano and piano, and the Gürzenich Orchestra now examines the orchestral version. In the very first poem, The Face of Nature, the composer’s musical language builds bridges to Jean Sibelius, while Sumun läpi – Through the mist – explores impenetrable, mysterious worlds of sound. The soloist in this performance is a longtime artistic companion of Saariaho, the singer Anu Komsi. Whoever tries to spot British sounding melodies in Dvořák’s »English« symphony, his 8th, will most certainly be disappointed. The Czech composer merely switched to a British publisher for this buoyant work, hence the misleading title. The symphony is bold, and vigorously joyful. It has an introspective beginning, but after less than a minute, the atmosphere takes a turn for the jubilant, culminating in a finale with festive, beaming fanfares. Antonín Dvořák is on the fast lane to success: »You want to know what I do? My head is full – if only one could write everything down immediately! […] The ease exceeds all expectations and the melodies just keep coming.
In his début at the helm of the BRSO Philippe Jordan, the music director of the Vienna State Opera since 2020, devotes himself to life’s dark side and a theme from world literature that has held composers spellbound time and time again: Faust. Franz Liszt, in the three movements of his Faust Symphony, delineates character studies of the three main figures – Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. His symphony culminate in a mystical finale with chorus and solo tenor, invoking the power of forgiveness through what Goethe called “the eternal feminine”. Wagner’s Faust Overture, on the other hand, is limited to the title figure, its sustained tempo describing his loneliness in his solitary study. Rounding off the programme is Liszt’s Danse macabre (Totentanz), a paraphrase on the Dies irae motif that is by turns apocalyptic, macabre and grotesque. Here, too, we hear the Faustian contest between Heaven and Hell.
In his début at the helm of the BRSO Philippe Jordan, the music director of the Vienna State Opera since 2020, devotes himself to life’s dark side and a theme from world literature that has held composers spellbound time and time again: Faust. Franz Liszt, in the three movements of his Faust Symphony, delineates character studies of the three main figures – Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. His symphony culminate in a mystical finale with chorus and solo tenor, invoking the power of forgiveness through what Goethe called “the eternal feminine”. Wagner’s Faust Overture, on the other hand, is limited to the title figure, its sustained tempo describing his loneliness in his solitary study. Rounding off the programme is Liszt’s Danse macabre (Totentanz), a paraphrase on the Dies irae motif that is by turns apocalyptic, macabre and grotesque. Here, too, we hear the Faustian contest between Heaven and Hell.
A programme with three works requiring solo singers is certainly something special – so that Frank Peter Zimmermann has brought along two pieces never heard before in the concerts of the BRSO: Bartók’s roughly ten-minute Rhapsody No. 2 for violin and orchestra (1928) and Martinů’s Suite concertante (1944), a four-movement violin concerto in everything but name. Both works thrive on the tension between original eastern European folk melodies, modern sonic garb and the unique individual styles of their respective creators. A folk inflection of a quite different kind depicts the “heavenly joys” that soprano Anna Lucia Richter invokes in the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. But the childlike naivety of this idyll openly displays its fractures, and perhaps no Mahler symphony is as enigmatic as his purportedly “simple” Fourth. Standing at the rostrum is the young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, now in his second appearance with the BRSO following his début of February 2020.
A programme with three works requiring solo singers is certainly something special – so that Frank Peter Zimmermann has brought along two pieces never heard before in the concerts of the BRSO: Bartók’s roughly ten-minute Rhapsody No. 2 for violin and orchestra (1928) and Martinů’s Suite concertante (1944), a four-movement violin concerto in everything but name. Both works thrive on the tension between original eastern European folk melodies, modern sonic garb and the unique individual styles of their respective creators. A folk inflection of a quite different kind depicts the “heavenly joys” that soprano Anna Lucia Richter invokes in the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. But the childlike naivety of this idyll openly displays its fractures, and perhaps no Mahler symphony is as enigmatic as his purportedly “simple” Fourth. Standing at the rostrum is the young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, now in his second appearance with the BRSO following his début of February 2020.
Among conductors, Giovanni Antonini continues to number among the “savages” who use ultra-brisk tempos to breathe unparalleled passion and vivacity into the music of bygone eras. In the meantime he no longer specialises in Baroque music, but increasingly devotes himself to the Classical and early Romantic periods. Between Mozart’s “Little” G minor Symphony and Haydn’s “Drumroll” Symphony (written for London), the soprano Lydia Teuscher will sing three famous concert arias by Mozart and Mendelssohn. The Mozart arias were originally inserted into comic operas by other composers; today they can be heard in concert as precious gems in their own right. Mendelssohn composed his aria of love and vengeance for Maria Malibran, placing at her side a poignant violin solo to be played by the virtuoso Charles-Auguste de Bériot, her lover at the time and later her husband.
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