ConcertPulse
Guest performance
Philharmonie Berlin, Chamber Music Hall (Berlin)
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Under the motto »Orchestra for Democracy«, the DSO invites the audience to two concerts that combine music and speech to make a powerful plea for human rights and the value of our democracy. Central works of classical modernism and late romanticism meet contemporary reflections and create a format that places the demands and reality of our society at the centre.
Under the motto »Orchestra for Democracy«, the DSO invites the audience to two concerts that combine music and speech to make a powerful plea for human rights and the value of our democracy. Central works of classical modernism and late romanticism meet contemporary reflections and create a format that places the demands and reality of our society at the centre.
Listen, join in, have fun, discover music – the radio3 Children’s Concerts of the DSO are the perfect introduction to the wonderful world of classical music. In six concerts per season, children of primary school age can get to know the orchestra’s enchanting sound machine in all its facets. Together with the DSO, moderator Christian Schruff takes the six to twelve-year-old concertgoers on entertaining and interactive voyages of discovery, tells exciting stories, and presents great music. Already before the concert, at the Open House in the foyer, the young music fans can get to know various instruments together with members of the orchestra, have their faces painted, do crafts, sing, and much more.
In addition to his career as a celebrated soloist, violinist Christian Tetzlaff performs all over the world with his own string quartet. This guest performance in the Chamber Music Hall opens with Beethoven's late, expressive String Quartet op. 131, the beginning of which Richard Wagner called “probably the most melancholy thing that has ever been expressed in sound”. In his “Choral Quartet”, Jörg Widmann expresses “sounds and phases of futility that come from nowhere and lead nowhere,” he says. The programme concludes with Johannes Brahms' Second Quartet, which steers a lush course between melancholy and joie de vivre.
For more than six decades, the chamber concerts by musicians from the Staatskapelle have been a constant feature of the Staatsoper programme. This season, ensembles have come together to select music from different periods, styles and cultures under the theme of ‘playing together’. On eleven dates in the Apollosaal, which with its special atmosphere is an ideal venue for chamber music and communicative interaction between players and listeners, works from the Baroque to the present day will be performed in constellations that are both exciting and harmonious, in which tangible contrasts play just as important a role as a common resonance and the balancing of opposites.
Mignon, Ophelia, and Mary, Queen of Scots—these three towering figures of literature and history provide the inspiration for an evening of words and music created by Christiane Karg, Malcolm Martineau, and actor Helmut Mooshammer. In addition to Goethe settings by Beethoven, Schubert, Wolf, Duparc, and Josephine Lange and Ophelia songs by Brahms, Strauss, Chausson, and Wolfgang Rihm, the program also includes Robert Schumann’s Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, the composer’s final vocal cycle written in 1852.
For Isabelle Faust only the art matters, not the trappings. She plays with aplomb, focus, deep feeling—that’s how the violinist enthrals the audience, particularly with Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto, which, seriously ill in 1967, he »squeezed out note by note, with difficulty«. Sharply reduced, introverted music that concentrates completely on the violin. Music that inquires into where we are going and why.
In 2016, the composer Robert Fürstenthal died in San Diego, California, at the age of almost 100. After fleeing the Nazis and settling in the United States in 1939, he had a successful career as an accountant before returning to composition in the 1970s, writing music that evokes his hometown of Vienna. Rafael Fingerlos, who collaborated with the composer on the premiere recording of his songs shortly before Fürstenthal’s death, is joined by Joseph Middleton to present a selection of these works, juxtaposed with compositions by Max Bruch, Johannes Brahms, and Franz Schubert.
For more than six decades, the chamber concerts by musicians from the Staatskapelle have been a constant feature of the Staatsoper programme. This season, ensembles have come together to select music from different periods, styles and cultures under the theme of ‘playing together’. On eleven dates in the Apollosaal, which with its special atmosphere is an ideal venue for chamber music and communicative interaction between players and listeners, works from the Baroque to the present day will be performed in constellations that are both exciting and harmonious, in which tangible contrasts play just as important a role as a common resonance and the balancing of opposites.
The presenters are also members of the orchestra and, at 14 to 19 years old, are just as old as their listeners in the audience. As the sponsoring orchestra of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the National Youth Orchestra will play for grades 5 to 13 in the Main Auditorium of the Philharmonie Berlin on 30 April 2025 and provide information about the orchestra and its repertoire: Where do most of the members come from? What do conductors have to say? Which parts are particularly challenging?
Beethoven's legendary letter to the “Immortal Beloved” inspired Detlev Glanert to write his Second Violin Concerto. Glanert wrote a work full of longing and passion for the violinist Midori; he has admired her since her days as an internactionally-acclaimed child prodigy. Midori is also the soloist in this performance with the National Youth Orchestra under the direction of Patrick Lange. The orchestra, of which the Berliner Philharmoniker is a patron, will also play Johannes Brahms' First Piano Quartet in Arnold Schoenberg's colourful orchestration.
Based in Prague, the multi-award-winning Bennewitz Quartet is regarded as a cultural ambassador for the Czech Republic, embodying the Bohemian-Czech sound idiom par excellence. The ensemble is named after the important violinist and founder of the Czech violin school Antonín Bennewitz. The programme includes Brahms' predominantly cheerful third string quartet, which he wrote in 1875 during a summer holiday on the Neckar near Heidelberg. For the string quintet by their compatriot Dvořák, the four Czechs have borrowed reinforcements from the Salzburg Hagen Quartet: Violist Veronika Hagen completes the line-up in the Bohemian master's third and final string quintet. Composed in 1893, it is one of the pieces that, like his 9th Symphony „From the New World“ and the 12th String Quartet with the nickname „American“, we owe to the composer's extended stay in the USA. Whether and to what extent some of the motifs and melodies originate from indigenous music that fascinated Dvořák has been a matter of some controversy among musicologists, though.
While writing his first two string quartets, Johannes Brahms struggled under the shadow of Beethoven, whose overwhelming influence he felt for decades. His Third Quartet of 1876 is audibly indebted to another composer: the light touch and musical wit of Joseph Haydn are present throughout the score. The Hagen Quartett’s program creates an intergenerational dialogue between the two composers.
