Classical concerts featuring

Thomas Guggeis

Mozart Week Salzburg

Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra / Alexej Gerassimez / Thomas Guggeis

Dance, language and fantastic images: the three orchestral works on this concert programme by the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra are bursting with creative energy. Ravel wrote »Daphnis et Chloé« as ballet music for Diaghilev’s famous »Ballets russes«. In fact, the composition first celebrated its great success as suites on the concert stage, where its genius is revealed to its full advantage. Ravel had a »great musical fresco painting« in mind for the ancient love story between the two outcast infants, »less concerned with the ancient than with remaining true to the Greece of my dreams«. He pours the rising sun, the song of the nymph and an ecstatic final frenzy into an early 20th century painting in a brilliant blaze of colour.

Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra / Alexej Gerassimez / Thomas Guggeis

Dance, language and fantastic images: the three orchestral works on this concert programme by the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra are bursting with creative energy. Ravel wrote »Daphnis et Chloé« as ballet music for Diaghilev’s famous »Ballets russes«. In fact, the composition first celebrated its great success as suites on the concert stage, where its genius is revealed to its full advantage. Ravel had a »great musical fresco painting« in mind for the ancient love story between the two outcast infants, »less concerned with the ancient than with remaining true to the Greece of my dreams«. He pours the rising sun, the song of the nymph and an ecstatic final frenzy into an early 20th century painting in a brilliant blaze of colour.

An evening with Renée Fleming

It always feels good to make music with friends – and when that friend is soprano Renée Fleming, you just know that something extra-special is on the cards. No introduction is required for one of the LPO’s best-loved guests, the American soprano whose personality lights up the world’s greatest stages and whose voice has been compared to double cream. ‘Unforgettable’ was how one critic described her 2022 Gala with the LPO, and tonight she returns to sing Richard Strauss’s radiant Four Last Songs. Music that never grows old, sung by one of the supreme voices of our time.

Renée Fleming sings Strauss

It always feels good to make music with friends – and when that friend is soprano Renée Fleming, you just know that something extra-special is on the cards. No introduction is required for one of the LPO’s best-loved guests, the American soprano whose personality lights up the world’s greatest stages and whose voice has been compared to double cream. ‘Unforgettable’ was how one critic described her 2022 Gala with the LPO, and tonight she returns to sing Richard Strauss’s radiant Four Last Songs. Music that never grows old, sung by one of the supreme voices of our time.

Fabulous

Werner is head over heels in love with Margareta. And since he is The Trumpeter of Säkkingen, it makes sense to serenade his sweetheart on said instrument: The perfect trigger for Gustav Mahler to become creative and start composing. In 1884, a stage production of the novel about Werner and Margareta is put on at the Hoftheater Kassel, and Gustav Mahler writes the music for it. Out of that, Blumine is the only remaining piece. The rest was destroyed by 24-year-old Mahler who was second Kapellmeister at the time – quality control at its most radical. Since this highly romantic but isolated movement wouldn’t really fit into Mahler’s next major project either, his first symphony, seven decades went by before Blumine was rediscovered: Pure, nearly unclouded beauty by Mahler, and with a trumpet solo to melt your heart. Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) is a collection of texts that always remained a source of inspiration for Gustav Mahler, and a point of focus in his musical thinking. The joy and suffering of love, life as a soldier, death and its gruesomeness: The Gürzenich Orchestra is once more looking forward to welcoming renowned mezzo soprano Anna Lucia Richter from Cologne who will perform songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Surely, what is nowadays referred to as Franz Schubert’s »small« C Major symphony must have felt quite »great« to the barely 21-year-old composer: The orchestra is generously staffed for the time (1818), and the wind section finds itself on the strong side of an emancipatory boost, having rarely been this prominently featured in a symphony. The young gentleman skillfully puts to use the achievements made by his Viennese role models Haydn and Beethoven – he even composes a bold scherzo which would certainly have pleased the great Ludwig. Still, Schubert tells his very own symphonic story which is far from being laden with pathos but instead defies gravity in a unique, somnambulistic way. Simply fabulous!

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