Even though the Bamberg Symphony is on tour in Asia, our followers will still be able to get their fix of classical music! You will have the chance to hear our sponsored orchestra, the Young German Philharmonic/Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, play in Bamberg in a public dress rehearsal as part of their spring work schedule.
Dvořák's American symphony, composed in 1893, is considered a masterpiece, blending Native American and gospel tunes with a Czech atmosphere. Brahms admired Dvořák's effortless creativity. Brahms's own symphonic peak, created in 1884/85, features themes in constant transformation. Ligeti's 1962 "Poème symphonique" stands as a unique creation, using 100 metronomes to create an effect of time and pulse.
"I spent such happy hours in your wonderful creation. One is enveloped by its mysterious spell from beginning to end!" Clara Schumann wrote these enthusiastic words about Brahms' Third Symphony, which he completed during his 1883 summer vacation in the area around Wiesbaden. His holiday routine was to go for an early morning walk or swim and then sit down at his desk or the piano. This creative process left its mark on the charming symphony, whose emotional beauty was praised by Dvořák, too: “It is pure love and makes your heart soar." Brahms in turn commented enviously on his colleague and close friend's inventiveness: “That fellow has more ideas than any of us. Everyone else could assemble their main themes from the scraps he has rejected." Dvořák's magnificent Eighth Symphony thus also features on our programme. In this work, composed in 1889 at his Czech country estate, he gave his creative imagination free rein – the outcome is a fascinating and multifaceted score that one biographer described as “brimming with vivid colour”. These two symphonies frame an ethereal piece by this year's jubilarian György Ligeti, who once said: "I have a vision, not a dogma, not a finished system. I don't want to achieve a result and then stop. I keep myself open to influences." His febrile 1967 composition "Lontano" is a journey into a utopian metaphysical realm of gradually evolving soundscapes. Ligeti suggested that listeners should imagine walking out of the bright sunlight into a dark room, where they would only gradually become able to perceive colours and contours.
“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”.
"I spent such happy hours in your wonderful creation. One is enveloped by its mysterious spell from beginning to end!" Clara Schumann wrote these enthusiastic words about Brahms' Third Symphony, which he completed during his 1883 summer vacation in the area around Wiesbaden. His holiday routine was to go for an early morning walk or swim and then sit down at his desk or the piano. This creative process left its mark on the charming symphony, whose emotional beauty was praised by Dvořák, too: “It is pure love and makes your heart soar." Brahms in turn commented enviously on his colleague and close friend's inventiveness: “That fellow has more ideas than any of us. Everyone else could assemble their main themes from the scraps he has rejected." Dvořák's magnificent Eighth Symphony thus also features on our programme. In this work, composed in 1889 at his Czech country estate, he gave his creative imagination free rein – the outcome is a fascinating and multifaceted score that one biographer described as “brimming with vivid colour”. These two symphonies frame an ethereal piece by this year's jubilarian György Ligeti, who once said: "I have a vision, not a dogma, not a finished system. I don't want to achieve a result and then stop. I keep myself open to influences." His febrile 1967 composition "Lontano" is a journey into a utopian metaphysical realm of gradually evolving soundscapes. Ligeti suggested that listeners should imagine walking out of the bright sunlight into a dark room, where they would only gradually become able to perceive colours and contours.
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