Symphony Concert: Richard Strauss

Klaus Mäkelä conducts Richard Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony”

He is a rising star among conductors: Klaus Mäkelä is just 29 years old, and already chief conductor designate of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. With Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony, he will be able to open a magnificent panorama of sound. The work takes us through a day in the mountains, across flowery meadows, through thunderstorms and storms. Wolfgang Rihm also favours lush sounds in Transitus III. “I love the intricate web of orchestral possibilities,” says our Composer in Residence, who died in 2024, “the creation of states, and of transformations.”

Klaus Mäkelä conducts Richard Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony”

He is a rising star among conductors: Klaus Mäkelä is just 29 years old, and already chief conductor designate of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. With Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony, he will be able to open a magnificent panorama of sound. The work takes us through a day in the mountains, across flowery meadows, through thunderstorms and storms. Wolfgang Rihm also favours lush sounds in Transitus III. “I love the intricate web of orchestral possibilities,” says our Composer in Residence, who died in 2024, “the creation of states, and of transformations.”

Klaus Mäkelä conducts Richard Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony”

He is a rising star among conductors: Klaus Mäkelä is just 29 years old, and already chief conductor designate of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. With Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony, he will be able to open a magnificent panorama of sound. The work takes us through a day in the mountains, across flowery meadows, through thunderstorms and storms. Wolfgang Rihm also favours lush sounds in Transitus III. “I love the intricate web of orchestral possibilities,” says our Composer in Residence, who died in 2024, “the creation of states, and of transformations.”

Concertgebouw Orchestra Essentials: Richard Strauss

The Essentials series introduces you to the masterpieces you will be happy to know, performed by the world-famous Concertgebouw Orchestra and complete with a lively introduction by the incomparable Thomas Vanderveken. At Essentials we welcome a new generation of music lovers, and the concerts typically have a pleasant informal atmosphere.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 Vassilyeva 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.Essentials starts at 9 p.m. with an imaginative introduction to the programme (in Dutch).

Gala concert – Richard Wagner

One of the artistic priorities of the Deutsche Oper Berlin has always been and remains the cultivation of the works of Richard Wagner. This means that Richard Wagner's music is firmly anchored in the DNA of this orchestra, its sound characteristics and its repertoire. In the 2024/25 season alone, five Wagner operas are on the programme: DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER, TANNHÄUSER, LOHENGRIN, TRISTAN UND ISOLDE and DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG. Time and again, spectacular stagings of the RING DES NIBELUNGEN (in Stefan Herheim's production again in May 2026) have attracted attention. The orchestra's special Wagner tradition is also reflected in the fact that many of its members play in the Bayreuth Festival orchestra. The orchestra brings this expertise with them to Chorin, where they present the most prominent passages from various Wagner operas for an entire afternoon. Members of the top-class soloist ensemble such as Maria Motolygina, Flurina Stucki, Martina Baroni, Attilio Glaser and Byung Gil Kim will be there. Our Kapellmeister Giulio Cilona will conduct.

Strauß Liszt Strauss

Strauß Liszt Strauss

Richard Wagner / Siegfried

Performed by the musicians of Concerto Köln and the Dresdner Festspielorchester under the direction of Kent Nagano, this Siegfried is the fruit of years of research into what would be a historically informed reading of Wagner’s operas.

Richard Wagner: Siegfried

Now he sets out into the world: Siegfried, the free hero, is to set right what Wotan, the father of the gods, messed up at the beginning of the story. Finally, part three of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" can be experienced in Kent Nagano's original sound project. Siegfried grows up in the forest, reforges the sword Nothung, slays the dragon Fafner, wins from him the "Ring of the Nibelung", breaks Wotan's spear and lovingly awakens the Valkyrie Brünnhilde.

Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider Ting-Wei Chen Richard Strauss Carl Nielsen Pyotr Tchaikovsky

According to legend, the charming swindler and prankster Till Eulenspiegel lived in the 14th century and is the hero of almost a hundred folk tales. In the tone poem Till Eulenspiegel from 1896, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) cheerfully portrays him with horn and clarinet. Till Eulenspiegel is one of Strauss’ most humorous works, as full of inventions and surprises as the main character. Till dresses up, flirts with the ladies and makes fun of the scholars before he is put on trial and sentenced to death. The ending is ambiguous – does he manage to escape?In 1921, Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) was captivated by a concert with the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. He knew the musicians, and wrote a piece for the quiet in which each one is described with music. He wanted to write one solo concerto for each – he managed two and started with the flutist.“Eventually, the orchestral movement also becomes fuller and more moving, but this does not last long, because the flute cannot deny its nature (...) the composer must therefore adapt to its gentle nature,” Nielsen wrote about the Flute Concerto from 1926, a gentle and cheerful work in which there is a storm in between.“The music from this ballet will become one of my best works. The subject is so poetic, so well suited to music, that I was entirely engrossed in composing it, and wrote with an ardor and passion which always results,” wrote Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1841-1893) during the work with Sleeping Beauty.With Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky set a completely new standard for the ballet genre and greatly raised the status of ballet music. Sleeping Beauty premiered in 1890. The Sleeping Beauty Suite, composed after his death, features five orchestral excerpts from the ballet.