Szymon Nehring performs Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Hamburg Symphony. The piece, initially met with skepticism, reflects Brahms' struggles after Schumann's suicide attempt and hearing Beethoven's Ninth. The concert also features Debussy's "La Mer" and "Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune," reflecting Debussy's love for the sea and its metaphorical representation of time.
Music connects and creates identity and community and, like language, it is an integral part of the human experience. Ernst Toch’s »Geographical Fugue« is a good example of how these two forms of expression can be combined to wonderful effect when he transfers the melody and rhythm of language to musical form. Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet movement in A minor, composed when he was just sixteen years old with a youthful zeal and enormous reverence for his great role model Johannes Brahms, tells of searching for and finding his own musical language.
Wherever it is important to convey the impression of enormous speed, of a rapid, glorious final spurt by means of selected music to moving images, the film and advertising industry prefer to use the well-known gallop from the William Tell Overture. However, this unspeakable habit creates a completely false impression of the entire overture to Rossini’s last opera. Who would have thought to expect the wonderful interplay between the solo cellos at the beginning or the refreshing freshness provided by the cor anglais and flute after the great thunderstorm - or indeed the whole breadth of the canvas that Rossini painted for his magnificent overture?
This piano quartet proves that you do not have to belong to the same generation to make superb music together. Pianist Alexandre Kantorow, to whom the Elbphilharmonie is dedicating a special focus this season, has been on a meteoric rise for several years and has already reached major venues by his mid-twenties. Cellist Victor Julien-Laferrière and violist Lawrence Power have used their advanced career of 10 and 25 years respectively for exciting solo projects, chamber music and much more. Young blood is now encountering great experience in the contrasting Piano Quartets Nos. 1 and 2 by Johannes Brahms. Brahms’ first two piano quartets were composed at the same time in 1861, when the young composer had moved from Hamburg to Vienna and had fallen in love with Hungarian folk music. Both works culminate in a lively, dance-like finale. The other movements also radiate a great deal of joie de vivre and enthusiasm.
Aris Quartett is a string quartet.
»Music is the universal language of mankind« – this quote from the American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reflects the power and importance of music. Music connects people from different cultures and backgrounds and creates a common language. The Hamburg Chamber Orchestra’s innovative concert series »Music of the World« begins with a cycle of Mozart’s 23 piano concertos in several concerts.
Alster Konfekt is an excellent salon ensemble with an extraordinary line-up. Lisa Butzlaff (flute), Fedor Erfurt (bass clarinet) and Natalya Klem (piano) cultivate the fine tradition of stylish salon and café music, charmingly and sophisticatedly presented in the best tradition of the »Palm Court« trio. In the (pre-)Christmas concert, the trio serves up a star-studded menu with an exquisite selection of fine classical music and salon music highlights. Swinging waltz melodies from the Strauss dynasty, spicy Hungarian appetisers such as »Eljen a Magyar« or Brahms’ »Hungarian Dances«, variations of unforgotten character pieces, Viennese songs, evergreens refined with the crème de la crème of salon music such as »Salut d’Amour«. With elegance, charm and verve, the Alster Konfekt trio brings musical delicacies from the noble and glamorous golden age to your ears.
Georgijs Osokins is the duo partner of the renowned violinist Gidon Kremer. He has also performed several times as a soloist in the Elbphilharmonie’s Grand and Recital Halls. On this evening, he will present a particularly demanding programme with works by Brahms, Haydn, Chopin and Liszt – the highest virtuosity paired with the greatest expressiveness!
»I have now found solace.« With these words, Johannes Brahms put the core of his monumental »German Requiem« in a nutshell: the deceased do not take centre stage as usual, but the bereaved. They are to find solace through the moving music and can cope with their grief. Brahms knew how to utilise choir and orchestra extremely effectively and created both deeply sad and devastating moments as well as comforting ones: in this way, life and death manifest in all their aspects. With French conductor Raphaël Pichon, a proficient expert and avowed fan of German repertoire now brings Brahms’ Requiem to the Elbphilharmonie. The ensemble Pygmalion, formed by him, assist him once more. This ensemble is well versed in period performance and its concerts are captivating due to their particular transparency and intimacy. Soprano Sabine Devieilhe and baritone Stéphane Degout also perform the solo parts. And Pichon also draws attention to Brahms’ musical roots: this way, we hear early baroque a-cappella music before the »German Requiem« – a tradition with which Brahms had also intensively grappled.
Ilya Gringolts violin
Founded while its members were all still studying at the renowned Royal College of Music in London, the Chiaroscuro Quartet will be celebrating its 20th anniversary next year. After all that time it is no wonder that Alina Ibragimova, Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux, Emilie Hörnlund and Claire Thirion share an implicit trust when making music together. One particular thing that makes them so special is the historical instruments they play on, which gives many well-known works an unexpected, fresh sound. They are joined by the world-class pianist Cédric Tiberghien, who has been Alina Ibragimova’s piano partner for many years now. He too is playing an historical grand piano for the evening’s programme. From his Op. 9 onwards, Joseph Haydn regarded his string quartets as part of the genre that he would go down in music history as having founded. Rather than writing divertimentos, commissioned by aristocratic patrons as a distracting amusement, he was now set on writing music to be listened to. And the Chiaroscuro Quartet, whose Haydn recordings were described by BR as a »sprightly, irresistibly brilliant attack on the ear – thrilling in the best sense of the word«, certainly demand to be listened to with a captivated attention. It promises to be equally lively when the quartet applies its playing style to the Romantics Schumann and Brahms, accompanied by the pianist Cédric Tiberghien, who won the German Record Critics’ Award with a Brahms chamber music album. Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet is at times tumultuous and at other times extremely tender, written to involve his wife, the piano virtuoso Clara Schumann, in the recent successes of his chamber music. Being a close friend of Johannes Brahms, she in turn encouraged him to rewrite a sonata for two pianos as a piano quintet, fearing that otherwise »many of the most beautiful ideas would be lost«. Brahms took her advice and went on to create chamber music filled with magnificent, almost orchestral tonal colours.
Thinking of forests in the finale of Mendelssohn’s immortally beautiful Violin Concerto in E minor is a real recommendation inasmuch as the fairies, will-o’-the-wisps and kind-hearted gnomes romping about in it are comparatively harmless creatures. Composed between 1838 and 1844 for his friend Ferdinand David, concertmaster of Leipzig’s Gewandhausorchester, it was intended to be a brilliant piece (»stilo moltissimo concertantissimo«). Mendelssohn joked back that the soloist’s entire first movement would consist of a single high E. In the end, the two Hamburg natives were extremely happy with the result.
He composes, conducts and also plays the piano sensationally well. Around six years ago, Fabian Müller wowed the ProArte audience in the »Discover Talent« series. Since then, we have followed his impressive career with admiration: the founding of the »Bonner Zwischentöne« chamber music festival was followed in 2023 by his own ensemble, »The Trinity Orchestra«, with which he can consistently realise his creative ideas. At the same time, highly acclaimed recordings were made and a professorship was not long in coming. Now the pianistic high-flyer is joining the ranks of our master pianists – with a programme in which Müller pays homage to his heroes Brahms and Beethoven.
»Energetic, dramatic and of crystal clear intensity,« praised the New York Times about the Tetzlaff Quartett, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in 2024. For its birthday, the ensemble, led by star violinist Christian Tetzlaff, has selected an emotional and demanding programme from Brahms right up to the present. There are two reasons to celebrate when the Tetzlaff Quartett returns to the Elbe river: besides their own anniversary, the musicians are also celebrating Arnold Schönberg, who celebrates his 150th birthday in 2024 and to whom the Elbphilharmonie is naturally devoting a special focus for this occasion. With his first string quartet, one of the composer’s earlier works is on the programme – radically innovative, yet still tonal, it pushes the artistic forms of the late Romantic period to their limit. In his own creative process, Schönberg studied the string quartets of Johannes Brahms in particular. Captivated and touched by his motif writing, Schönberg wanted to see himself in the Romantic tradition. How apt then that the Tetzlaff Quartett presents his work after the second string quartet by Brahms. Emotionally unsettling, incomprehensibly dense and profoundly melancholic, the composition is still one of the key works of the quartet repertoire. The musicians, however, open the evening with a fascinating insight into the musical present: for this, they provide the Second String Quartet by the successful composer Jörg Widmann, who has been closely connected with the Elbphilharmonie ever since it opened. His string quartet entitled »Choralquartett« is a unique slow and also emotionally profound movement which holds many novel sound effects.
There’s no better way of facing difficult days than with a refreshing Rossini overture! Almost every one of them begins slowly, with many shuffling lazily at the start. Yet the overture to his »William Tell«, for example, unleashes so much energy after a few minutes that it’s almost impossible not to move to the music. Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto also contains plenty of dynamism, but it’s full of bitterness and sarcasm. Mischa Maisky has been performing the work for many decades – and yet he still finds new ways of approaching the not inaccessible concerto. It’s a highly personal piece in which the composer inscribed his own name in musical letters. And it goes surprisingly well with Rossini! A few years later, in his final symphony, Shostakovich would quote that galloping main theme from the fast part of Rossini’s overture. An erratic, dance-like motif that goes perfectly with Beethoven’s rousing Seventh Symphony! A few years after it was written, one critic (who surely did not imagine his words would be one of our absolute favourites two hundred years later) wrote: »It consists of four movements of almost 1/4 hour each, thus making the whole at least 3/4 hour, and it is a veritable quodlibet of tragic, comic, serious and trivial ideas, which stray here and there without context, are repeated ad nauseam, and almost burst because of the excessive noise of the timpani.« Why don’t you tell us what you really think, my friend!
The Amaryllis Quartet celebrates its 20th anniversary and in its programme concept refers to Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most important string quartet composers. At the same time, the new series of CD releases with works by Beethoven and classical modernism will be presented. What has been particularly important for the quartet in 20 years? Contemporary music. For this reason, the first performance of a commissioned composition is planned again. The programme will conclude with Johannes Brahms’ late work, the String Quintet in G major with two violas. A jubilant and exuberant work that seems detached from all earthly complaints. Lena Eckels, who was a member of the Amaryllis Quartet for ten years, will be playing the second viola again as a guest. There couldn’t be a more fitting line-up for the anniversary.
Well, that is a matter of taste. But in general, Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem is considered the ultimate in this genre in music history – alongside Bach’s Mass in B minor, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and the Requiem settings by Mozart and Verdi.
This man is unstoppable! After his fascinating journey around the world with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Víkingur Ólafsson has set himself a programme of contrasts for this season: solitude and contemplation – a pianist alone with 88 keys in 88 concertos – is followed by big sounds, big orchestras, big emotions. Both piano concertos by Johannes Brahms accompany him and us through this season. The passionate first, which the young Brahms initially conceived as a symphony, kicks off the programme. Accordingly, the piano part is closely linked to the orchestral parts. It’s good to have such accomplished partners as the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Edward Gardner at your side! The British orchestra complements the programme with Bartók’s »The Miraculous Mandarin« and a work by its current composer-in-residence, the Cuban-American composer Tania León.
A highly desirable piano recital: the young star pianist Alexandre Kantorow presents an atmospheric and varied programme from Bach to Bartók – with music to amaze and melt the audience’s heart. The Telegraph calls him a »poet at the piano«, in the Austrian press he is considered »one of the best pianists in the world«, and the New York Times reports that he far exceeds all high expectations: Alexandre Kantorow is a true rising star of the piano world. As Artist in Residence at the Elbphilharmonie, the Frenchman is organising a whole series of concerts, of which his solo evening in the Grand Hall is a particular highlight. The programme includes music from the Baroque to the 20th century: virtuoso works with a Hungarian flavour by Béla Bartók and Franz Liszt as well as Sergei Rachmaninov’s rarely heard First Sonata – a powerful and highly emotional work that seems to push the expressive possibilities of late Romanticism to their limits. Brahms, with whose music Alexandre Kantorow has been making a name for himself for some time, provides the framework for the evening. As part of his Elbphilharmonie residency, Kantorow will also be focussing on the great Romantic composer: he performs Brahms’ piano quartets in a high-calibre four-piece ensemble and presents his Second Piano Concerto in the Grand Hall. And for his solo recital, he not only has a lively and lyrical rhapsody in store, but also Brahms’ arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous Chaconne for solo violin, which the piano composer realised in a sophisticated way for the left hand on the piano.
The Albert Schweitzer Youth Orchestra is celebrating its 50th anniversary with this special concert. It is a great honour for the orchestra to have a real world star as a soloist for this occasion: Christian Tetzlaff, who also played in the Albert Schweitzer Youth Orchestra as a teenager. In the course of his international career, Christian Tetzlaff has performed with all the major orchestras, including the Vienna and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, the Concertgebouworkest in Amsterdam and all the London orchestras. He has worked with legendary maestri such as Sergiu Celibidache, Bernard Haitink, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur and Christoph von Dohnányi. Johannes Brahms’ Violin Concerto still occupies an outstanding position in the literature of violin concertos. It was completed in 1878 and dedicated to the famous violinist Joseph Joachim, who assisted Brahms in writing the solo part. The première was a year later in Leipzig under Brahms’ direction and with Joseph Joachim on the violin. Four years before Brahms’ violin concerto, the operetta »Die Fledermaus« was composed in 1874 by Johann Strauss (son). The overture is a brilliant compilation of the most beautiful melodies from the operetta. Cheerful with bubbling energy on the one hand and on the other hand a highly highly demanding work that requires great virtuosity from the orchestra. The opera »Der Rosenkavalier« was premiered in 1911 and is a masterful blend of comedy and romance. Richard Strauss combined all the highlights of the opera into a purely orchestral suite, in which the audience hears, among other things, the prelude to the first act, the presentation of the roses and the touching final tercet from the third act. The tumultuous Viennese waltz with which Baron Ochs leaves the bar is, of course, included.
It is by no means a given that outstanding soloists are also brilliant chamber musicians. How do you find a common musical breath? How do you bring your sound ideas together and mould them into a musical thought? Not problems for Julia Fischer and Jan Lisiecki! When they appeared on stage as a duo for the first time at the Rheingau Music Festival in 2022, it was clear that they had found themselves a dream team. The same undisguised view of the works, the same joy of playing and enthusiasm for working together. Luckily for the audience, the pair will also be making a stop in Hamburg on their next tour together, enriching the ProArte programme with a fine evening of chamber music featuring sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann.
It would be hard to imagine a more contrasting pair: On the one hand, Víkingur Ólafsson – a rather introverted artist, reserved in demeanour, richly nuanced in his playing. On the other, Yuja Wang, whose demeanour is almost as spectacular as her sensational pianistic skills. What they both have in common: They are unimpressed by the opinions of others. And they are damn good. In this ProArte concert, the Chinese power woman and the Icelandic sound conjuror now unleash a veritable firework display of pianism. The backbone of their concert is formed by Franz Schubert’s F-minor Fantasy and Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances (originally: Fantastic Dances) – late works by the two composers that are almost like a life review. With short works by contemporary composers such as John Adams and Arvo Pärt, Wang and Ólafsson embed these two major works in an appealing new musical context.
Notos Quartet
In Garmisch, August 1941, Richard Strauss completed his last opera "Capriccio", a one-act opera described as intellectual and witty, a stark contrast to the horrific events of its time. The opera features beautiful music. Bohuslav Martinů, a prolific Czech composer, left behind nearly 100 chamber music works. His String Sextet, composed in Paris in 1932, won the Coolidge Prize. Brahms' String Sextet No. 1, initially conceived as a septet, received widespread acclaim.
France calls the German art song »Le lied«. This resonates respect for this world-famous phenomenon, but also a lot of autonomy at the same time. The French art song is actually very self-confidently called »mélodie«. With Katharina Konradi and Catriona Morison, two equally top-class singers present a programme which delightfully contrasts Schumann and Brahms’ songs with their French contemporaries. Katharina Konradi is best known to the Hamburg audience from the local State Opera, where you could already have experienced her as an ensemble member in numerous leading roles. Catriona Morison’s award-winning mezzo-soprano impresses with its »warm-earthy timbre and excellent clarity«, as the FAZ wrote about one of her song recitals. The political and military conflicts between Germany and France in the 19th century did not stop even when it came to art – many French composers wanted to audibly break away from their neighbours. However, this does not mean that people had closed their ears to sounds beyond the border. France’s most important song composer, Gabriel Fauré, loved the classical song form just as much as Brahms. Ernest Chausson gravitated more to Richard Wagner’s free recitative. As repertoire gems, the singer duo have brought along songs by a sister duo: the opera diva Maria Malibran died at just 28 years old and, in addition to umpteen thousands of fans, also left behind a handful of songs. Her sister Pauline Viardot-García, conversely, became very old – and is one of France’s composers absolutely worth rediscovering!
The Neue Philharmonie Hamburg is a concert hall located in Hamburg, Germany. It is home to the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra.
The »Somerset Rhapsody« by Gustav Holst is an atmospheric and picturesque composition in which Holst was inspired by the idyllic English county of Somerset as well as many English folk songs. Delicate and tranquil melodies at the beginning evoke a sense of rural beauty, from which the full splendour of Somerset emerges: Large hills, meandering rivers and peaceful villages are just a few images that the composer musically conveys to the listener with his melodies over the course of his work. Belá Bartók’s Viola Concerto is considered one of the most important works for viola and orchestra, and not only in the 20th century. Several versions of this concerto can be found today, which is due to the fact that the composer was unable to complete this work during his lifetime. His pupil Tibor Serly completed the fragments handed down by Bartók into a concerto. The Bartók/Serly version is a three-movement work. It begins with a serious Moderato, followed by a fairly short, slow second movement and a finale in third place, which was composed in an Allegro vivace. Bartók’s compositional style is not based on song-like, motivic melodies as was common in the Romantic period. Instead, the composer creates his themes with a semitone whole-tone scale, which he uses to shape the concerto for viola and orchestra. The demanding solo part is played by 19-year-old Johannes Loschelder from the ranks of the Jugend Sinfonieorchester Ahrensburg. The Hamburg composer Johannes Brahms took his time with the publication of his First Symphony. He took around 20 years to complete it, putting himself too far in the shadow of the great symphony composer Ludwig van Beethoven. The four-movement work contains a densely woven introduction that introduces the dark and tense themes of the Symphony in C minor. Brahms’ symphonic style is characterised by singing melodies and instrumental solos, for example in the lyrical second movement. This contrasts with the rhythmic and dance-like character of the third movement, for which an exuberant cantilena in the clarinet at the beginning forms the basis. The final movement rounds off his 1st Symphony in C minor brilliantly: here too, Brahms opens the movement with a sombre and tense introduction, then plays an »alphorn melody« in joyful C major before moving on to the main movement, whose main theme is familiar to many thanks to the Hamburg Journal, for example. The themes are developed by Brahms and lead to a coda that rounds off this work impressively.
When a world-class orchestra bestows a 21-year-old conductor with the title of principal guest conductor, this says something. But the debut by the Finn Tarmo Peltokoski on the stand for the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in 2021 filled the musicians with enthusiasm to such an extent that they awarded this accolade for the very first time. After his Elbphilharmonie debut in March 2023, Peltokoski is now a guest again and walks together with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen on the winding paths of Symphony No. 5 by Jean Sibelius. Beforehand, you can experience a soloist in Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with Fabian Müller, who is at the head of the young generation of German pianists. Johannes Brahms wrangled for a long time with the composition of symphonies; Beethoven’s legacy seemed too great for him. The idea of transforming initial symphonic plans into a piano concerto came to him in a dream: »I was absolutely delighted!« he writes to Clara Schumann. Fabian Müller, who since winning five prizes at once at the ARD International Music Competition in 2017 is a sought-after pianist, elicited enthusiastic cheers at the Elbphilharmonie together with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen just last year – high time to build on this success. Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 came about in a very lengthy process. The Finnish composer was still on the search for new solutions for a genre overloaded with traditions. But the long work paid off – with this symphony, Sibelius has one of his most original and most popular works!
Gustav Mahler’s development and work as a composer focussed mainly on two musical genres: symphony and Lied (song). Again and again, the two very different forms approached each other, but the combination of the monumentality of the symphony and the intimacy of the song reached a hymn-like climax in »Das Lied von der Erde«. A compositional legacy based on texts by Hans Bethge that Mahler left to the world, knowing full well that his own death was already waiting for him at the next corner. Arnold Schönberg arranged Mahler’s final song for a chamber orchestra for the concerts of the »Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen«, a work that was finally completed by Rainer Riehn. The arrangement for chamber orchestra turned Mahler’s composition into a masterpiece of its own kind, in which the essence of the original sound is preserved through careful reduction and transformed into a new quality of characterisation and emotional experience.
»We are like tightrope walkers who try to give each other the optimal position for the triple somersault with a screw,« says Anne-Sophie Mutter, summarising the special nature of her long-standing stage partnership with Lambert Orkis. They have been rehearsing, travelling and performing together for 35 years – and are celebrated worldwide for their intense chamber music dialogues. »We like each other, we like each other’s playing and presence. [...] A large part of our communication is exclusively through sound,« says Orkis, revealing part of the secret of their success. This also includes the well-chosen programme combinations, which always offer room for new discoveries alongside well-known works by Mozart or Schubert – such as the wonderful three Romances by Clara Schumann, which the composer herself once premiered with the famous violinist Joseph Joachim.
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