ConcertPulse
Stilles Appassionata
Entrance is free, donations are welcome.
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Entrance is free, donations are welcome.
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.
Maurice Ravel’s ecstatic, sonorous Boléro under the night sky of Berlin – the Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko could hardly have chosen a more atmospheric work to end the season at the Waldbühne. But first, star pianist Yuja Wang will be the soloist in Prokofiev’s sparkling, virtuosic irst Piano Concerto – a work in which the musician can show off her remarkable technical skills and her creative power to best advantage. Ravel’s Suite No. 2, from the shimmering and impressionistic ballet Daphnis et Chloé, also transports the listener to a pastoral idyll from ancient mythology.
Giuseppe Verdi is the only composer featured on the program of this year’s Open Air at Odeonsplatz with the BRSO conducted by Christian Thielemann – and yet, this is a program rich in contrasts. First, there is ballet music that Verdi added in some of his operas in order to please the dance-obsessed Parisian audience: the Witches’ Dance from Macbeth, a dance interlude during the coronation festivities in Don Carlo, and the ballet music in Otello. The orchestra will then join forces with the BR-Choir and perform Verdi’s musical testament: the Quattro pezzi sacri. The four movements comprising the work are Verdi’s last sacred compositions. While Verdi was not religious, he nevertheless wanted to take this work with him in afterlife: “With this hymn of praise I will go before God and beg him for mercy.”
At least since Rhythm Is It! and his staged reading of the St Matthew Passion, Simon Rattle has been considered a multi-media trailblazer in new forms of musical outreach. Now the designated head of the BRSO will give his début at “Klassik am Odeonsplatz” with an exciting evening of film scores. The programme features Korngold, Rósza, Raksin and John Williams, stylistic trendsetters in a genre that has itself long entered the classical repertoire. As early as 1989 Rattle first conducted the soundtrack to Henry V, and in 2006 he performed the score of Tom Tykwer’s Perfume at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic. Odeonsplatz listeners will be treated to Korngold’s Robin Hood (1938) and Rózsa’s Ben Hur Suite (1959), both of which won Oscars, as well as Rósza’s Violin Concerto (1953), the basis of the film score to Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The soloist is the young violinist Veronika Eberle. And it goes without saying that Hollywood’s éminence grise John Williams will also be there – with such classics as Star Wars, Harry Potter and Indiana Jones.