Munich Philharmonic / Renaud Capuçon / Daniel Harding

Munich Philharmonic / Daniel Harding

Daniel Harding is by no means a stranger to the Munich Philharmonic. The British conductor regularly works with the venerable orchestra, which celebrated its 130th anniversary at the beginning of the season. An eventful time full of musical highlights: there is surely no other orchestra that performs the great repertoire as magnificently and colourfully as the Philharmonic from the Bavarian capital. Take Gustav Mahler’s phenomenal Symphony No. 5, for example. When it was premiered in 1904, the large-scale work, with its five expansive movements, broke through the boundaries of what had previously been considered possible. Surrounded by an infernal orchestral frenzy, the fourth movement alone provides some sense of relaxation. After it was featured in Visconti’s film »Death in Venice«, this enchanting adagietto became Mahler’s most popular creation. With his 1926 symphonic poem »Tapiola«, a musical invocation of the Finnish forest god Tapio, Jean Sibelius composed his last great orchestral work.

Chamber Orchestra – Renaud Capuçon

Daniel Harding

Daniel Harding is a welcome guest at the helm of the BRSO. This time he will conduct a programme fully deserving of the title “from adversity to the stars”. Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel Symphony of 2020 was commissioned by several orchestras, including the BRSO. Here he takes up important passages from his like-named opera, premièred at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, and combines them into a four-movement symphony. The starting point was a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel, in which a group of high-bred socialites gather together for a party and are condemned to a nightmarish journey. Adès has supplied music at once exciting and weirdly grotesque. Following this surrealistic vision of Hell there begins a very real heaven-assailing ascent to the heights with Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.

Daniel Harding

Daniel Harding is a welcome guest at the helm of the BRSO. This time he will conduct a programme fully deserving of the title “from adversity to the stars”. Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel Symphony of 2020 was commissioned by several orchestras, including the BRSO. Here he takes up important passages from his like-named opera, premièred at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, and combines them into a four-movement symphony. The starting point was a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel, in which a group of high-bred socialites gather together for a party and are condemned to a nightmarish journey. Adès has supplied music at once exciting and weirdly grotesque. Following this surrealistic vision of Hell there begins a very real heaven-assailing ascent to the heights with Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.

Daniel Harding

Night walk with Daniel Harding: in the somber Funeral March, Gustav Mahler’s shadowy, gloomy Seventh Symphony emerges as “the psychogram of a compulsive existence” (Wolfgang Stähr). Nachtmusik I, characterized by a horn duet, casts a wistful glance into bygone times; the Scherzo acquires a restless, spooky character; and Nachtmusik II becomes a nocturnal serenade especially through the presence of a guitar and a mandolin, instruments rarely found in an orchestra. After the eerie nocturnal atmosphere of the previous movements, the work’s gigantic finale transports the listener towards the light – a change of mood that left the audience attending the work’s premiere somewhat perplexed. Today, Mahler’s Seventh is considered a masterpiece of symphonic form, as will be exemplified in Mahler specialist Daniel Harding’s performance.

Daniel Harding

Night walk with Daniel Harding: in the somber Funeral March, Gustav Mahler’s shadowy, gloomy Seventh Symphony emerges as “the psychogram of a compulsive existence” (Wolfgang Stähr). Nachtmusik I, characterized by a horn duet, casts a wistful glance into bygone times; the Scherzo acquires a restless, spooky character; and Nachtmusik II becomes a nocturnal serenade especially through the presence of a guitar and a mandolin, instruments rarely found in an orchestra. After the eerie nocturnal atmosphere of the previous movements, the work’s gigantic finale transports the listener towards the light – a change of mood that left the audience attending the work’s premiere somewhat perplexed. Today, Mahler’s Seventh is considered a masterpiece of symphonic form, as will be exemplified in Mahler specialist Daniel Harding’s performance.

Daniel Harding

Night walk with Daniel Harding: in the somber Funeral March, Gustav Mahler’s shadowy, gloomy Seventh Symphony emerges as “the psychogram of a compulsive existence” (Wolfgang Stähr). Nachtmusik I, characterized by a horn duet, casts a wistful glance into bygone times; the Scherzo acquires a restless, spooky character; and Nachtmusik II becomes a nocturnal serenade especially through the presence of a guitar and a mandolin, instruments rarely found in an orchestra. After the eerie nocturnal atmosphere of the previous movements, the work’s gigantic finale transports the listener towards the light – a change of mood that left the audience attending the work’s premiere somewhat perplexed. Today, Mahler’s Seventh is considered a masterpiece of symphonic form, as will be exemplified in Mahler specialist Daniel Harding’s performance.

Daniel Harding

Night walk with Daniel Harding: in the somber Funeral March, Gustav Mahler’s shadowy, gloomy Seventh Symphony emerges as “the psychogram of a compulsive existence” (Wolfgang Stähr). Nachtmusik I, characterized by a horn duet, casts a wistful glance into bygone times; the Scherzo acquires a restless, spooky character; and Nachtmusik II becomes a nocturnal serenade especially through the presence of a guitar and a mandolin, instruments rarely found in an orchestra. After the eerie nocturnal atmosphere of the previous movements, the work’s gigantic finale transports the listener towards the light – a change of mood that left the audience attending the work’s premiere somewhat perplexed. Today, Mahler’s Seventh is considered a masterpiece of symphonic form, as will be exemplified in Mahler specialist Daniel Harding’s performance.

Daniel Harding

Night walk with Daniel Harding: in the somber Funeral March, Gustav Mahler’s shadowy, gloomy Seventh Symphony emerges as “the psychogram of a compulsive existence” (Wolfgang Stähr). Nachtmusik I, characterized by a horn duet, casts a wistful glance into bygone times; the Scherzo acquires a restless, spooky character; and Nachtmusik II becomes a nocturnal serenade especially through the presence of a guitar and a mandolin, instruments rarely found in an orchestra. After the eerie nocturnal atmosphere of the previous movements, the work’s gigantic finale transports the listener towards the light – a change of mood that left the audience attending the work’s premiere somewhat perplexed. Today, Mahler’s Seventh is considered a masterpiece of symphonic form, as will be exemplified in Mahler specialist Daniel Harding’s performance.

Daniel Harding

Night walk with Daniel Harding: in the somber Funeral March, Gustav Mahler’s shadowy, gloomy Seventh Symphony emerges as “the psychogram of a compulsive existence” (Wolfgang Stähr). Nachtmusik I, characterized by a horn duet, casts a wistful glance into bygone times; the Scherzo acquires a restless, spooky character; and Nachtmusik II becomes a nocturnal serenade especially through the presence of a guitar and a mandolin, instruments rarely found in an orchestra. After the eerie nocturnal atmosphere of the previous movements, the work’s gigantic finale transports the listener towards the light – a change of mood that left the audience attending the work’s premiere somewhat perplexed. Today, Mahler’s Seventh is considered a masterpiece of symphonic form, as will be exemplified in Mahler specialist Daniel Harding’s performance.