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Italy in May is always a good idea. The 22-year-old Strauss concurred: following Brahms’ advice, he travelled to Italy in April and May 1886, visiting Florence, Rome, Bologna, Naples and Capri. The four movements of his symphonic fantasy transport the listener to the “Campagna,” “Rome’s Ruins,” and the “Beaches of Sorrento,” before finally plunging into the lively “Neapolitan Folk Life” – a showpiece for the Neapolitan conductor Riccardo Muti, who has frequently performed it during the course of his career, including a performance with the BRSO forty years ago in 1984. With the inclusion of works by Haydn and Schubert as well as the participation of the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the maestro presents a programme that also features other companions with whom he has long cultivated a close relationship.
Italy in May is always a good idea. The 22-year-old Strauss concurred: following Brahms’ advice, he travelled to Italy in April and May 1886, visiting Florence, Rome, Bologna, Naples and Capri. The four movements of his symphonic fantasy transport the listener to the “Campagna,” “Rome’s Ruins,” and the “Beaches of Sorrento,” before finally plunging into the lively “Neapolitan Folk Life” – a showpiece for the Neapolitan conductor Riccardo Muti, who has frequently performed it during the course of his career, including a performance with the BRSO forty years ago in 1984. With the inclusion of works by Haydn and Schubert as well as the participation of the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the maestro presents a programme that also features other companions with whom he has long cultivated a close relationship.
Italy in May is always a good idea. The 22-year-old Strauss concurred: following Brahms’ advice, he travelled to Italy in April and May 1886, visiting Florence, Rome, Bologna, Naples and Capri. The four movements of his symphonic fantasy transport the listener to the “Campagna,” “Rome’s Ruins,” and the “Beaches of Sorrento,” before finally plunging into the lively “Neapolitan Folk Life” – a showpiece for the Neapolitan conductor Riccardo Muti, who has frequently performed it during the course of his career, including a performance with the BRSO forty years ago in 1984. With the inclusion of works by Haydn and Schubert as well as the participation of the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the maestro presents a programme that also features other companions with whom he has long cultivated a close relationship.
With Different Trains, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and written in 1988, the American minimalist composer Steve Reich transformed an event of contemporary history into a musical work of art. The “different trains” tell of his childhood, during which he travelled many times across the American continent in order to commute between his separated parents, while at the same time Jewish children in Europe were being deported by train to concentration camps. Reich, who is himself Jewish, superimposes the sounds and rhythms of moving trains with tape recordings of eyewitnesses in a fascinating manner, and thus commemorates the shocking simultaneity of completely divergent realities. Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross was composed in 1787 for a Good Friday service in Cadiz in southern Spain. In their meditative and timeless grandeur, the (almost) exclusively slow movements are among Haydn’s most poignant works.
The chamber music of the Viennese Classical period contains both occasional works for private music-making as well as sophisticated concert music – and this duality will be evident in this charming concert for winds and strings. Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D major, composed during his stay in Mannheim in 1777, and Haydn’s Divertimento in C major, composed during his second trip to London in 1794, were both commissioned by amateur flutists. On the other hand, Mozart conceived the oboe part of his Quartet in F major, composed in 1781, for one of the best oboists of that time, Friedrich Ramm; it was probably intended as a token of appreciation for Ramm’s excellent performance at the premiere of Idomeneo in Munich. Beethoven had something quite different in mind with the three String Trios op. 9: with their heightened expressivity and expansive dimensions, they embody a type of chamber music that is no longer lightweight but rather has become a serious discourse for connoisseurs. The third Trio in C minor constitutes the pinnacle of the set.
Simon Rattle felt no hesitation in commencing his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Chor and Symphonieorchester des BR with Haydn’s Creation. “It contains everything. The whole world. It looks both towards the past and far into the future of everything music can be. It is balance and revolution at the same time, a true work of the Enlightenment.” Magnificent choruses, graceful melodies, the finest polyphony, all firmly anchored in an optimistic view of humanity: “Anyone who doesn’t automatically feel better after hearing it really needs help,“ Simon Rattle says with a wink.” The Creation is healthy in a very honest way.” But health also includes a good dose of humor, and Haydn provides it, even in a setting as sacred as the Creation story. At the same time, a work radiating light also casts some shadows on our own present. What has remained of the spirit of the Enlightenment? And what have we done with the “world, so great, so wonderful”?
Simon Rattle felt no hesitation in commencing his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Chor and Symphonieorchester des BR with Haydn’s Creation. “It contains everything. The whole world. It looks both towards the past and far into the future of everything music can be. It is balance and revolution at the same time, a true work of the Enlightenment.” Magnificent choruses, graceful melodies, the finest polyphony, all firmly anchored in an optimistic view of humanity: “Anyone who doesn’t automatically feel better after hearing it really needs help,“ Simon Rattle says with a wink.” The Creation is healthy in a very honest way.” But health also includes a good dose of humor, and Haydn provides it, even in a setting as sacred as the Creation story. At the same time, a work radiating light also casts some shadows on our own present. What has remained of the spirit of the Enlightenment? And what have we done with the “world, so great, so wonderful”?
“My Fifth Symphony is an accursed creation. No one understands it.” Only after Mahler’s death did the initial incomprehension change to admiration for this forward-looking piece. Yearning for death and affirmation of life, Weltschmerz and fulfilment, sorrow and joy: all lie side-by-side in this symphony, as so often in Mahler. It opens with a funeral march, its centre is a Ländler followed by a musical declaration of love, and it ends in an apotheosis. James Gaffigan precedes Mahler’s trailblazing sonic universe with Haydn’s Sinfonia concertante, a work no less modern for its own era. By having four solo instruments (oboe, bassoon, violin and cello) stand out from the orchestral tutti, Haydn situates the piece between an instrumental concerto and a symphony – a welcome task for soloists from the ranks of the orchestra.
The violin theme that opens Haydn’s B flat major String Quartet op. 76/4 soars into the heights above a sustained chord in the other strings. Listeners felt they heard the rising of the sun – hence the work’s nickname, the “Sunrise” Quartet. Here Haydn’s music, in its allusive idiom, takes on almost proto-romantic traits. In contrast, Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz (Slow movement) for string quartet sounds like a distant echo of the romantic era. His Six Bagatelles set out in a wholly different vein. These terse miniatures dispense with everything incidental, suggesting with a just few notes something that listeners can project further in their own minds. Finally, Schumann’s Piano Quintet is not only one of his most celebrated creations, but the piece that established the piano quintet genre in the first place. Clara Schumann rapturously summed it up: “a work abounding in vigour and novelty”.
Among conductors, Giovanni Antonini continues to number among the “savages” who use ultra-brisk tempos to breathe unparalleled passion and vivacity into the music of bygone eras. In the meantime he no longer specialises in Baroque music, but increasingly devotes himself to the Classical and early Romantic periods. Between Mozart’s “Little” G minor Symphony and Haydn’s “Drumroll” Symphony (written for London), the soprano Lydia Teuscher will sing three famous concert arias by Mozart and Mendelssohn. The Mozart arias were originally inserted into comic operas by other composers; today they can be heard in concert as precious gems in their own right. Mendelssohn composed his aria of love and vengeance for Maria Malibran, placing at her side a poignant violin solo to be played by the virtuoso Charles-Auguste de Bériot, her lover at the time and later her husband.
Over the last few weeks Igor Levit, one of the great Beethoven pianists of our era, explained and played all 32 Beethoven sonatas on BR-KLASSIK. Now he’s the BRSO’s artist-in-residence for the 2020–21 season! Levit has already thrilled audiences by playing four Beethoven piano concertos with the same orchestra, most recently the Second, with his idiosyncratic blend of stylistic fidelity and spirit of adventure. All that’s missing is the First, op. 15, which now stands on the programme to complete the cycle. At the head of the orchestra is Riccardo Minasi, the principal conductor of the Mozarteum Orchestra and a champion of period performance practice. He’s giving his début with “Viennese classics”: Beethoven will be followed by Haydn’s Symphony no. 88, a French-inspired work that enchants us with its expressive Largo and its lilting dance movements, whether gruff in the Minuet or elegant in the Finale.