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Bold and witty, rebellious and captivating – a great way to kick off the year 2025, together with our audience. Also joining us: Till Eulenspiegel and his Merry Pranks, compiled and turned into a symphonic poem by the Bavarian magician of sound, Richard Strauss. Indeed, this is a milestone in orchestra literature. It is masterfully orchestrated, and was premiered almost exactly 130 years ago by the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne.

Cheeky and witty, rebellious and rousing, this is how we start the year 2025 with our audience, featuring Maurice Ravel with his most stubborn and at the same time most popular stroke of genius and Bernd Alois Zimmermann from the Rhineland, who shows himself from a completely different side to celebrate the day.

26 years old, and just married to a woman who is an avowed Fennoman (a Finland enthusiast), young Jean Sibelius starts composing his first tone poem. Rather than following a specific musical road map, his En saga is more of a fairy tale of mystic landscapes. It shows vast surfaces of sound, subdued melancholy, and here and there, cheerful trolls pop up for a perky little dance. Incidentally, the first sketches to this piece were made in Austria, where Sibelius, the composer with the Swedish accent, spent his time in Viennese coffee houses, reading the Finnish national epic, the Kalewala. »I never felt more Finnish than in Vienna, Italy and Paris.«

Who's up for classical music? For the third time, the Philharmonie opens its doors to young people when the Gürzenich Orchestra invites them to »Concert & Kölsch«.

Two fifth symphonies from Russia: In 1944, Sergei Prokofiev spent some time in the countryside where he had all the peace and calm he needed in order to compose, while back home in Moscow, people were suffering from hunger and homelessness. What Prokofiev brought to paper is lushly orchestrated, patriotic, and deliberately Russian in its rhythm and melodies. Not to mention a tremendous amount of heroic pathos, in light of the global war against Nazi Germany. In his op. 100, we see the composer as a mature, experienced symphonist, and as grand master of instrumentation. He creates veritable »orchestral paintings« – some lyrical and sumptuous, some dark and warlike.

Many people, connoisseurs and amateurs alike, have an illustrious list of one-and-only musical works that they have grown to love forever. This concert features two of the top candidates that would rank high in the charts of all-time-favorite-classical-pieces. The Gürzenich Orchestra builds a bridge from Robert Schumann to Gustav Mahler, from dramatic, boasting virtuosity all the way to the abysmal depths of the soul. Barely half a century lies between Schumann’s only piano concerto and Mahler’s fifth enormous symphonic endeavor. But how different were the artistic worlds they each thrived in, and how turbulent were the political, technological and cultural changes that took place over the course of these few decades! Still, the works are each considered to be exemplary of a deeply romantic approach to the world.