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British conductor Simon Halsey leads »SINGING!« 2025 and, together with the NDR Vokalensemble, the award-winning choral conductor wants to breathe new life into the participatory concert after the coronavirus years. Register now to take part!
The legendary maestro Pinchas Zukerman returns to the Elbphilharmonie! He will be joined by the Sinfonia Varsovia, one of the most important symphony orchestras in Europe. Works by Mozart, Elgar and Mendelssohn Bartholdy will be performed in a festive concert. The violinist, violist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman was born in Tel Aviv in 1948. In 1961, at the age of 13, he met Pablo Casals and Isaac Stern at the first Israel Festival. A year later, he went to New York to study with Ivan Galamian at the Juilliard School of Music and made his concert debut just a short time later. As an internationally sought-after soloist and conductor, Pinchas Zukerman performs with major orchestras including the English Chamber Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Staatskapelle Berlin and the National Arts Centre Orchestra. In addition to numerous awards and prizes, Pinchas Zukerman has received two GRAMMY Awards for his more than 100 CD recordings in the categories »Best Classical Performance« and »Best Chamber Music Performance«. His musical partners include Daniel Barenboim, Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Yefim Bronfman and Amanda Forsyth, with whom he is also close friends. The Sinfonia Varsovia is one of the most important symphony orchestras in Europe. When the legendary violinist, violist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin came to Warsaw in 1984 to work with the Polish Chamber Orchestra, it was expanded and became Sinfonia Varsovia. Shortly afterwards, Yehudi Menuhin became the orchestra’s first guest conductor. Since then, the orchestra has performed worldwide and recorded more than 300 albums.
The season of the Klassische Philharmonie Bonn ends as it began – with Beethoven! This time, however, Beethoven’s most famous symphony, Symphony No. 5, which has become known as the Fate Symphony, is juxtaposed with a piano concerto by Johannes Brahms. Brahms’s second piano concerto was composed 22 years after the first work in this genre and is partly symphonic in scale. And yet Brahms himself wrote about the work to Elisabeth von Herzogenberg that he had written »a very small piano concerto with a very small, delicate scherzo«. The soloist in this concert is the 21-year-old American Caleb Borick, who won the International Telekom Beethoven Competition in 2023. But the beginning of the concert starts up north to the Scottish Hebrides: Felix Mendelssohn was privileged by his wealthy family, enabling him to undertake numerous journeys – including to Scotland, to the Hebrides, whose rugged beauty he translated into nature.
In 1829, 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn sketched the Hebrides Overture while in Scotland. Years later, it premiered in London after revisions. Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto, influenced by Alban Berg, premiered in New York in 1940 after revisions. Beethoven's Second Symphony, despite being composed during a difficult period, is surprisingly bright and unconventional, challenging traditional forms.
The career of Sir András Schiff, one of the world’s leading pianists, has already lasted over half a century. You can frequently also experience the all-round musician as a conductor and he regularly collaborates with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Schiff and this orchestra share an interest in historically informed interpretations. In 2021, the perfectly matched duo documented its artistic connection in an acclaimed recording of Brahms’ piano concertos and now presents works by two composers who embody the very essence of German Romanticism: Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The renown of Robert Schumann’s piano concerto is so great to this day that hardly anyone knows the other works he composed for piano and orchestra. Anyone who wants to change this can let themselves be inspired by Schumann’s »Allegro appassionato« at the start of the concert, which exhausts the whole spectrum of romantic moods from the greatest tenderness to gloomier drama and, as an aside, lights a real firework of pianistic brilliance. Afterwards, Sir András Schiff swaps the keys for the baton and conducts excerpts from Mendelssohn’s »A Midsummer Night’s Dream« – a string of pearls of perfectly drawn scenes and character sketches whose elegance and casual sophistication is consistently astonishing. We come full circle when Schiff returns to the piano in order to conclude the evening with Schumann’s piano concerto, which is quite rightly one of the most popular perennials of the concert repertoire!
»I don’t think it’s a symphony of destiny, but rather Beethoven shows us the way to a better world in the course of the symphony.« Antonello Manacorda and the Kammerakademie Potsdam, which has grown into an outstanding ensemble under his direction, surprised audiences with this view of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony last year when their recording caused a furore in the classical music scene. Rarely has so much fresh wind blown through what is probably the most famous sequence of notes in music history – a »Ta-da-da-daaaa« full of zest for action. In top violinist Christian Tetzlaff, the Kammerakademie Potsdam has found a brother in spirit: »He is someone who is always curious!« says the classical music column in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Undoubtedly an outstanding quality for a musician who has mastered the art of making the familiar sound new and unheard of again and again.
The Albert Schweitzer Jugendorchester (ASJ) returns to the Laeiszhalle with a special concert and presents a varied programme of pieces from the early Romantic period. The programme begins with parts from the incidental music »A Midsummer Night’s Dream« by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. This dazzling and dance-like music, which enchants with its lightness and playful elegance, brings Shakespeare’s magical world of fairies, lovers and goblins to life.