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» A slender Greek maiden between two northern giants! « was Robert Schumann’s comment on Beethoven’s 4th Symphony. The Fourth: So is this one of the » little « symphonies, sandwiched between the Eroica and the » Symphony of Fate «? Well, yes: firstly, the Fourth is longer than the Fifth and secondly, the composer interrupted work on the Fifth in order to write the Fourth. It seemed more important to him at the time. And yet it is not important in any way. Hardly any other work by Beethoven displays so much sparkling, sometimes subtle humour with so much verve. There is so much to discover in this symphony, which begins like Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony almost 90 years later and whose conclusion sounds like the experimental laboratory of a mad professor in search of the perpetuum mobile.

A trip to the circus enchants, sparks the imagination and opens the way to distant cloud castles. And some of the artists whisk the audience away into a colourful and mysterious world with wondrous instruments. This is a story full of secrets, friendship, courage and lots of music!

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart called death » man’s best friend « and had no idea that he would die before he could complete his last great work. His Requiem is one of a long series of musical works that capture the church’s rite of farewell in sound, accompanying it with tones, giving it a form that goes beyond the text and reinforces its ritual character. Rituals of farewell, rituals of new beginnings: an attempt to find support and thereby gain new perspectives, to make it possible to live on in the face of death and with death. We are trying to gain new perspectives on Mozart’s Requiem, whose performances have become part of concert rites. To this end, we will interrupt Mozart’s unfinished work at selected points and illuminate the essential questions behind the work in words and sound. Hardly any composer has found a wider range of expression between deep, personal despair and the brightest light for the ancient texts!

Autumn is approaching and with it the time when the mice go in search of food for the cold months. But Frederick isn’t thinking about that at all! He prefers to collect colours, music and stories. Let’s find out together how they can help him through the winter and inspire his friends!

Le mystère des voix bulgares: this was the name of a legendary record (or rather a series of records) that electrified music fans all over the world: rough, rubbing, flattering, incredibly rhythmic choral sounds that had never been heard before! Or had they? Béla Bartók, the great Hungarian folk music researcher, had already poured them into his string quartet in the 1930s, and Bulgarian ensembles and choirs had never stopped cultivating the country’s musical traditions. East and West, church sounds and fast-paced village bands meet here. The quartet around our violinist with Bulgarian roots, Maria Geißler, embarks on a virtuoso and sensuous search for traces.

When we hear the name Beethoven, huge symphonic clouds and fantastic piano virtuosity pile up in front of us. But we also find the latter in Beethoven’s stage works. For six months, selected school classes work with Beethoven’s overtures, which subtly hint at the events to come on stage. In the final concert, the pupils and the Beethoven Orchester Bonn show what they have created artistically with artists, music teachers and their teachers.

In a kind of mini-residency, we present saxophonist Asya Fateyeva, who will not only be our guest at BaseCamp on 17 May, but has also brought a colourful concert programme from the Baroque period with works based around the noble concept of hope to the Old Federal Council. But beware: » Hope, that’s a dangerous thing! «, as not only Lana del Rey sings, but as poets, writers and artists of all genres have been saying since ancient times! But that doesn’t stop composers from writing the most beautiful music on this subject. The unusual combination of saxophone with baroque harp and lute promises exciting sound journeys into the emotionally charged world of the baroque!

After Vivi Vassileva in 2023, this season we are once again putting a young instrumentalist at the center of the BaseCamp: Asya Fateyeva is a saxophonist born in Crimea who has been playing in the » premier league « since winning the German Music Competition in 2012. She won the ECHO Klassik in 2016. For this exceptional artist, there are no musical boundaries, just heaps of exciting music from all genres that she adapts. The focal point of our BaseCamp New Music is the fantastically beautiful saxophone concerto Saivo by Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen. She sees music as a force of nature that can change lives – and calls for us to rethink and change our relationship with nature. Like Sauli Zinovjev (see Freitagskonzert 3), she is interested in ancient rituals, especially those of the Sámi people of her Finnish homeland: for the Sámi, Saivo is a sacred place where dialogue is possible beyond the boundaries of this world. The I and the you, water and stone, fire and ash and a descent to the spirits of the ancestors – Saivo is a great spiritual journey, made for the vastness of space in BaseCamp!

Light in all its colors is the focus of our spring symphony concert – in the month in which the trees glow in all shades of green: »In the beautiful month of May … «! Few symphonies are as radiant as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s so-called Italian Symphony, in which he musically processes his journey to Italy, just as he did with his trip to Scotland. However, the Italian Symphony is not a program symphony, but rather takes up the moods and attitude to life of the country south of the Alps and transforms them into music: there is the cheerful verve of the opening movement, the Sicilian furor of the final tarantella and the pastoral smile of the scherzo. And as a contrast: the evocation of a Good Friday procession, the pacing, the memory of beloved dead people – with only occasional rays of sunlight breaking through the clouds. This distant light is the main component of Pēteris Vasks dreamlike violin concerto Distant Light, which he wrote for Gidon Kremer towards the end of the 20th century. The violinist Vadim Gluzman, who has already made a breathtaking recording of the concerto, will be our guest again. The concert opens with the playful Concerto for Strings by Polish composer Graz˙yna Bacewicz – just made for our virtuoso string players!

A favorite of the gods, an early achiever: » Felix «, the lucky one? Branded as brilliant and superficial by musicologists. Reviled and ostracized by the National Socialists. A fate that Mendelssohn Bartholdy shares with many musicians of Jewish descent. What does this say about our society? What place does his music have in our lives today, and how can we rediscover it? Because if you embark on the Mendelssohn Bartholdy adventure: What fire, what passion – how were such misjudgments possible? Bettina Böttinger goes in search of clues with the conductor Ruth Reinhardt.