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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.

As in our Freitagskonzert 8, we are travelling to Vienna in the last chamber concert of the season, to a time of decadence, decay and overwrought nerves. But also to a time of awakening, of rewiring these nerves, which were treated by Doctor Freud and his colleagues. Intoxicating chamber music awaits us, centred around the shortest but best-known piece on the programme: the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony, immortalised by the Visconti-film Death in Venice. The piano really roars here, taking over the harp part from the original version … Alexander Zemlinsky’s Piano Trio is the oldest piece on the programme and looks back to the past, as it is strongly influenced by Johannes Brahms. Mahler’s symphony was composed around five years later and looks back and forward at the same time – a seemingly timeless work. And Korngold’s Suite from 1930? Written for the left hand of the war-wounded pianist Paul Wittgenstein (like works by Ravel, Prokofieff, Britten and many others), it is no longer the bold work of a child prodigy of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but a grandiose homage to the splendour of music that has fallen out of time and hangs in no man’s land, between sparseness and opulence, optimism and pessimism, forward and backward-looking …

Naftule is a globetrotter and music lover! His king, ruler of the land of Sinfonia, sends him out into the world with his friend Pino to make friends with other countries. It’s a good thing that people in Sinfonia communicate through music – a language that is understood all over the world. Jump on the magic carpet and hear what people all over the world have to say musically!

What about the musical family? I’m not talking about the Mozarts, the Bachs or the Kanneh-Masons. But rather the musicians with whom, without any help, a special bond is formed, with whom you are always happy to get together. For Dirk Kaftan, Tetiana Miyus and Alexandre Tharaud definitely belong to this circle of people. He has performed countless opera evenings with Tetiana Miyus in Graz, she was the soloist in a guest performance by the Graz Philharmonic Orchestra in Taiwan and she has also performed twice in Bonn, both times on a smaller scale. Now she sings the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s pastoral, heavenly, enigmatic 4th Symphony in G major as part of a Freitagskonzert at the end of the season. There is talk of saints and angels, of the little lamb and Herod. A great »as if«, so it is said of this symphony. Maurice Ravel was also a master of the »as i«. As a tribute to his 150th birthday, we are playing his groovy, humorous Piano Concerto in G major after the intoxicating Daphnis and Chloé in the second symphony concert. A request from Alexandre Tharaud after he performed Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand with the Beethoven Orchestra in 2018. G major: What a difference between the playful lightness and bite of Ravel’s concerto and Mahler’s symphony in the same key, smiling with tears (or crying with a smile) … Two masters of modernism with different views of the world. Incidentally, Lili Boulanger – unlike Maurice Ravel – was the first composer to win the coveted Prix de Rome, which was to pave the way for a great career for French composers. Unfortunately, she was already seriously ill at the time and died far too young. The inscription on Franz Schubert’s grave could also have been dedicated to her: » The art of music buried here a rich possession; but even more beautiful hopes. «

1900: The world flew apart! Psychoanalysis dissected the human soul, physics divided atoms, the churches visibly lost their importance. The belief in a God-created and God-ordained universe was reduced to rubble in numerous conflicts that flared up all over the world, but at the latest in the trenches of the First World War. One of the first to attempt to capture the world in musical form in all its collage-like, kaleidoscopic diversity was Gustav Mahler. His 4th Symphony, written in seemingly cheerful G major, tells of heaven and hell, promises us paradise and pulls the rug from under our feet. What is the balance between diversity and unity in our time? What do we believe in and what do we long for? Bettina Böttinger and Dirk Kaftan get to the bottom of these questions.

In the summer of 2025, the idea of telling musical stories from the Bonn of the young Ludwig van Beethoven with the Beethoven Orchestra is more than seven years old. In preparation for the Beethoven anniversary in 2020, we asked ourselves how we could best resurrect Beethoven in Bonn. The answer seemed as simple as it was obvious: by playing the music he grew up with. Music that he played as a pianist, organist and violist, that he listened to at home and at parties. The most modern and best music of his time: the Elector of the time owned scores of all the Haydn-symphonies that were available, including the symphony known today as La Poule (The Chicken) No. 83. Some of the orchestral musicians were outstanding composers, such as Andreas Romberg. And they must also have had outstanding instrumental qualities, considering the technical difficulties for the solo instrument that characterise Romberg’s violin concertos, for example. A panorama of Bonn’s musical history from the second half of the 18th century … and in some cases – such as Romberg’s violin concerto – even new in a way, as it has not actually been played for around 230 years.