ConcertPulse
Guest performance
Philharmonie Berlin, Chamber Music Hall (Berlin)
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Was the world a better place in the Romantic era? Alexander Melnikov explores this question through his piano recital – following the theme of our Biennale entitled Paradise lost? On the threat to nature. With Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, Melnikov leads you through idyllic landscapes and man-made chasms, reveals the poetry of Schumann’s Waldszenen, and shows atmospheric images of nature in Franz Liszt’s piano works. The forest appears here as a place of retreat – from the self and from encroaching industrialisation. By contrast, Alexander Scriabin prophesies the destruction of the world in the grand conflagration of Vers la flamme.
Gentle drizzling, vigorous splashing, thunderous drumming – rain comes in many guises. Hanns Eisler’s 1941 film score Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain was one of his best chamber music works. Today, in the face of accelerating climate change, weather patterns take on a whole new urgency. Inspired by Eisler, Gregor Mayrhofer explores these phenomena in his composition Tipping Points. Fourteen ways to describe climate change, a commissioned work which will be premiered as part of our Biennale, explores pivotal moments for our climate. The physicist and science journalist Harald Lesch will host this dialogue concert.
Slovakian organist Zuzana Ferjenčíková dedicates her debut concert on the organ of the Berlin Philharmonie Berlin to her teacher Jean Guillou, who died in 2019. Guillou performed on the the Philharmonie’s organ several times himself. His speciality: his own arrangements of famous orchestral works, with which he created unexpected orchestral timbres on the organ. Zuzana Ferjenčíková plays some of Guillou's most impressive arrangements, including the delicate “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker and Mussorgsky's powerful cycle Pictures at an Exhibition.