Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays Luca Francesconi

Cancelled: Johanna Vargas & Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Unfortunately, this concert has to be cancelled without replacement. Ticket buyers will be informed by e-mail. Under the following link you can request a refund of your ticket price: Information on tickets refunds

Patricia Kopatchinskaja spielt Schostakowitsch, Ligeti und Hartmann

Emelyanychev & Kopatchinskaja

Tempestuous, spontaneous, subversive—and preferably barefoot. That describes Moldavian violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. She hates perfection and polished surfaces. And she will go all out in Bartók’s 2nd Violin Concerto from 1939 as well. She shreds wildly with the bow on her valuable instrument, as can be seen in a YouTube video, grinning and asking herself: »Why the heck did I become a violinist?« Why indeed? Quite simply because she can play—sensationally well. Which means: her concert is not to be missed!

The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen / Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Pekka Kuusisto

The orchestra as a powerhouse – with its virtuosity and joy of playing, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen creates electrifying concert experiences. For their first Elbphilharmonie concert of the season, Pekka Kuusisto can demonstrate his talent on the rostrum and, with music by Samuel Barber and Sergei Prokofiev, tease out late romantic pathos and edgy drama from the members of the Kammerphilharmonie. Exceptional violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja can again illustrate on Arnold Schönberg’s violin concerto that classifications such as unplayability have no meaning for her. With Samuel Barber’s »Adagio«, the programme begins with a piece that explores the sound of a full string orchestra in its entire depth. After this melancholic curtain-raiser, a work takes to the stage whose complexities have certainly made some musicians get their fingers in knots. To breathe life into the demanding lines and figurations of Arnold Schönberg’s violin concerto calls for an artist of Kopatchinskaja’s calibre. She combines supreme technique with perfect versatility and musical imagination. After the interval, Kuusisto then plunges into the existential drama of Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet music of »Romeo and Juliet« with the Kammerphilharmonie. Captivating melodies, brilliant orchestration, snappy rhythms and devastating tragedy – with these ingredients, Prokofiev portrayed the greatest love story of all time and in so doing created one of his most popular works.

Jan Mráček plays Strawinski

“Coincidence is itself merely the collision of the creative impulses.” (Friedrich Nietzsche) This concert presents a sound sculpture premiered in 1963 that plays with coincidence and seeks to exhaust the possibilities offered by mechanics. Ligeti’s "Poème symphonique" is a fascinating musical experiment: on stage are 100 metronomes, which are set in motion by some musicians. The metronomes tick away valiantly, all higgledy-piggledy at first, but then more and more of them lose their momentum and fall silent, until in the end only the most persistent metronome remains. Stravinsky, a musical revolutionary like Ligeti, once said of his creative ideas: "You take up a tradition to make something new." For his 1931 Violin Concerto, he drew on the baroque era – but defiantly spiced his music with whimsical ingredients from 20th-century light music. We look forward to welcoming Czech violinist Jan Mráček to the stage as our soloist in this exciting work. Mráček was the youngest prize winner of the "Prague Spring" competition in 2010 and since then has carved out a remarkable career. To bring our programme to a close, our orchestra will play a work that critic Eduard Hanslick found to contain an extraordinary "energy of genuine symphonic invention”. Brahms had completed his last symphony during his summer vacation of 1885. Even before its premiere in Meiningen, which the composer himself conducted, the work triggered associations with the cosmos in Brahms’ friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg: "The deeper I look into it, the more stars appear, the more individual joys I have, both expected and surprising, and the clearer becomes the consistent character that makes a unity of this multiplicity”.

Vadim Gluzman plays Prokofiev

»Passion is a state of the soul.« Salvator Dali once said this – and Tchaikovsky can arguably be regarded as the embodiment of this state: He was an emotional man through and through, who often struggled with not being what society expected him to be. Even his nanny called him a »porcelain child«. His states of mind left traces, especially in his most individual symphony, which was premiered in 1893 shortly before his unexpected death. He said he had »put his whole soul into the "Pathétique«: The work outlines different stages of his life with passionate melodies as well as an orgy of bass notes – and concludes with a heartbreaking Adagio. Prokofiev, too, was regularly subject to severe hostility and left his Russian homeland after the October Revolution of 1917 – but was never really pleased with having to live in what he saw as an alien »mental climate«. Shortly before he returned, he wrote the Second Violin Concerto in 1935 during his »nomadic existence«: although it is peppered with sarcastic humour, it follows the great Romantic tradition: one biographer characterised »the almost cliché-like enchanting« gesture of the solo violin in the Andante as »soulfulness« – in which Vadim Gluzman will wallow. A contemporary example of an artist who had to leave his beloved fatherland is the eminent composer Valentin Silvestrov: he fled Ukraine for Berlin. At the beginning of our concert, we will play his »Evening Serenade« from 2002 under the baton of Juraj Valčuha – a very melancholic piece which, thanks to its contemplative limbo, seems like a memory of beautiful and fulfilling hours of times gone by.

Vadim Gluzman plays Prokofiev

»Passion is a state of the soul.« Salvator Dali once said this – and Tchaikovsky can arguably be regarded as the embodiment of this state: He was an emotional man through and through, who often struggled with not being what society expected him to be. Even his nanny called him a »porcelain child«. His states of mind left traces, especially in his most individual symphony, which was premiered in 1893 shortly before his unexpected death. He said he had »put his whole soul into the "Pathétique«: The work outlines different stages of his life with passionate melodies as well as an orgy of bass notes – and concludes with a heartbreaking Adagio. Prokofiev, too, was regularly subject to severe hostility and left his Russian homeland after the October Revolution of 1917 – but was never really pleased with having to live in what he saw as an alien »mental climate«. Shortly before he returned, he wrote the Second Violin Concerto in 1935 during his »nomadic existence«: although it is peppered with sarcastic humour, it follows the great Romantic tradition: one biographer characterised »the almost cliché-like enchanting« gesture of the solo violin in the Andante as »soulfulness« – in which Vadim Gluzman will wallow. A contemporary example of an artist who had to leave his beloved fatherland is the eminent composer Valentin Silvestrov: he fled Ukraine for Berlin. At the beginning of our concert, we will play his »Evening Serenade« from 2002 under the baton of Juraj Valčuha – a very melancholic piece which, thanks to its contemplative limbo, seems like a memory of beautiful and fulfilling hours of times gone by.

Concertgebouw Orchestra plays Beethoven

In her first performance with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Han-Na Chang champions Beethoven’s lyrical Fourth Symphony. Bernd Richard Deutsch’s Phantasma was inspired by Beethoven and Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze on display in Vienna’s Secession Building. Phantasma made a big impression on audiences at its world premiere, performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in October 2022. Klimt’s idealised vision of the world, brilliant explosions of colour, symbols and even gold – Deutsch brings them all to life in the music.Richard Strauss was unrivalled in his ability to make the most fantastic scenes come to life in music. Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote served as Strauss’s inspiration for his Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character. The adventures of the knight-errant and his faithful squire, as heroic as they are hilarious, come to life as the orchestra’s principal cellist Tatiana Vassiljeva and principal violist Santa Vižine, with support from the tenor tuba and bass clarinet, join their orchestra in battle. But who are they fighting? Windmills, sheep and, of course, the knight of the bright moon. Han-Na Chang now makes her first appearance with the Concertgebouw Orchestra five years after it was originally scheduled owing to the coronavirus pandemic.

Alina Ibragimova plays Prokofiev

In a time of revolution, Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto wove fairytale magic – and no-one makes it dance like Alina Ibragimova.‘Music is life’, declared Carl Nielsen, ‘and like it, inextinguishable!’ Defiant words from a composer who’d seen a world laid waste by war, but they could serve as motto for this concert from the dynamic Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu. In a time of revolution, Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto wove fairytale magic – and no-one makes it dance like our soloist Alina Ibragimova. There’s a vision of cosmic beauty from the late, great Kaija Saariaho. And finally, Nielsen launches a struggle for the future of existence itself: his shattering Fifth Symphony is one of those pieces that simply has to be experienced live.Please note start time.

Jan Lisiecki plays Beethoven

There are few experiences in classical music more invigorating, or more stirring than Sibelius’s Second Symphony. Imagine a swelling river of sound; a musical voyage that begins amid the tranquillity of nature and ends in a surge of triumph. That’s Sibelius’s Second Symphony, and there are few experiences in classical music more invigorating, or more stirring. For the young Finnish conductor Tarmo Peltokoski, Sibelius is a national hero. There’s another tale about memory to be told here, as Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki takes centre stage to showcase the grandeur and glory of Beethoven’s mighty ‘Emperor’ Concerto – a work dedicated to the composer’s patron and friend, Archduke Rudolf. *Please note a change of programme from originally advertised