Christmas concert! In the Laeiszhalle! Where else? Brandenburg an der Havel is really beautifully situated, but – for understandable reasons – cannot boast a comparable concert hall. So we are bringing the first Brandenburg concert to Hamburg, with a brilliant ensemble led by Primarius Adrian Iliescu on the Violino concertato, which also makes the journey home on the holiday night infinitely more pleasant than a trip anywhere else. Bach is known to have set off for Hamburg in 1720 – a small trip around the world for the Köthen native at the time, but also a very painful one: his first wife Maria Barbara had died suddenly just a few weeks earlier while he was in Karlsbad. The first of Bach's "Concerts avec plusieurs instruments" from March 1721 should therefore be particularly dear to our hearts. 

Bach, Vivaldi and Dvořák in the Great Hall of the Laeiszhalle

Laeiszhalle Hamburg

Performances of Beethoven's Ninth at the Laeiszhalle around the turn of the year have long since become a popular tradition. With the work, which was premiered around 200 years ago, the composer made music history with the fourth movement, as he introduced the use of vocal soloists and choir into an unusually comprehensive symphony, which was to change the genre forever. Schiller's "Ode to Joy", set to music in it, conveys a vision of universal brotherhood and unity of all people that extends beyond national and cultural boundaries. Beethoven set the words to emotionally powerful music that Berlioz praised as "unsurpassably great", Mendelssohn Bartholdy praised as "the highest that a human being can achieve", Wagner paid homage to as "the human gospel of the art of the future" and elicited the moving verdict from Tchaikovsky: "Beethoven's Ninth is not only the greatest, but also the most human of all symphonies."

A Hamburg tradition at the turn of the year

Together with KiKA presenter Juri Tetzlaff and his best friend "Hasi", our Hasi children experience four exciting and funny cushion concerts in Studio E of the Laeiszhalle. The most important creatures in the lives of our little guests are warmly invited: their favorite cuddly toys. They even get their own "box seat" at the concert. Before each concert, the children receive a real Hasi letter and can of course write back to Hasi. This creates a close exchange between our Hasi listeners and the performers.

Juris Stuffed Animal Concert

Classical music is rarely experienced in such a relaxed, informal setting. The lunch concerts of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra make it possible: On a flying visit to Hamburg? A bit of time during your lunch break? Looking for an idea for a group outing? Every one or two months, you can simply drop by the Brahms Foyer of the Laeiszhalle on a Tuesday afternoon. You don't even need a ticket for these chamber music delicacies. Entry is free, but places are limited (and the seats even more limited!). There is just a donation box at the exit - for anyone who enjoyed it.

flute, clarinet, bassoon and horn

Whenever it is important to convey the impression of enormous agility, of a rapid, glorious final spurt, by means of carefully selected music for moving images, the film and advertising industries like to use the well-known gallop from the William Tell Overture. However, this unspeakable habit creates a completely wrong impression of the entire overture to Rossini's last opera. Who would even think of expecting the same piece of art to contain the wonderful interplay of the solo cellos at the beginning, or the refreshing freshness provided by the English horn and flute after the great thunderstorm - or indeed the entire width of the canvas that Rossini illustrated for his magnificent overture?

Bruch Violin Concerto and Brahms 2nd

The wish sounds presumptuous: a ladies' string trio from the Far East (Japan, Taiwan, China) gathered one fine morning in one of the most beautiful houses in the metropolis of Hamburg and invited a world-class Swedish pianist to join them in playing the finest chamber music pearls from Russian, Spanish, Argentinian, Polish and Thuringian pens... How lucky we are!

soloists from the orchestra

When Haggai Cohen-Milo describes his approach to creatively engaging with works of concert literature from the perspective of a jazz musician, it is flying objects in space that spring to mind. When exploring the work, he feels like a spaceship that is attracted to the moon - the work - and accelerates further as a result, and finally overcomes the gravitational forces through targeted counter-steering, shoots past it and can explore new worlds: worlds that lie beyond it. 

Haggai Cohen-Milo Volume X »Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune«

After the young Polish pianist Szymon Nehring enjoyed a tremendous success last season with Mozart's "Jenamy" Concerto in E-flat major, he is now sitting at the grand piano in the Great Hall again with the first piano concerto in D minor, op. 15 by Johannes Brahms, who was about the same age at the time at just under 30.

"You see, this is a symphony theme," Anton Bruckner is said to have added to his overflowing quotation list after hearing the beginning of Brahms' concert colossus. But it was not only in Vienna that the strange hybrid work was met with scepticism. At the first performance in Leipzig at the Gewandhaus, the opus failed - "brilliantly and decisively" (Brahms). In 1860, a Hamburg critic spoke of a "symphony with obbligato piano." There were two shocks that the young Brahms was probably trying to process in his work: Schumann's suicide attempt in February 1854 and Beethoven's Ninth, which he had heard for the first time in his life. At the planned premiere of his concert in the Hamburg Musikverein, Brahms was denied the only playable grand piano. So he traveled with his work to Hanover for the premiere under the direction of his friend Joseph Joachim in January 1859.

Szymon Nehring with Brahms' Piano Concerto – Works by Debussy

The "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) is Claude Debussy's most popular and also his first important symphonic work. What's more, with its free form, which was completely innovative at the time, and its fascinating synthesis of nature experience and fantasy, it has become the key work of an entire era - "there is good reason to say that modern music awakens in Après-midi d'un faune," according to Pierre Boulez. It is based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé published in 1876: With an enigmatic, overwhelming feeling of fleeting eroticism, a faun (half man, half goat) awakens in the idyllic Arcadia and, half-asleep, remembers flirting with and chasing two lovely nymphs. Both managed to escape him, however, before he went back to sleep. Debussy described it in a somewhat more prosaic way to a conductor who had asked for more detailed explanations: "It's about a shepherd who plays the flute while sitting with his bottom in the grass."

"Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune", "La Mer" and Dvořák's 8.

Gabriel Fauré was also swept along by the same current in music history that had gripped Debussy, who was 17 years younger than him - or rather, that he had finally set in motion. Both composed music for Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama "Pelléas et Mélisande", which was celebrated as a cult in the 1890s. Under great time pressure, Fauré entrusted the orchestration of his work, written in 1898, to his student Charles Koechlin. Fauré conducted the premiere in London himself. Of the original 19 parts, only four excerpts were published, which form the suite as we know it today. It is undoubtedly Fauré's most beautiful orchestral work, in an orchestration that he revised again.

Magdalena Kožená, Gergely Madaras – “Pelléas et Mélisande” and “The Moldau”

Mozart himself sat at the piano in Vienna's "Mehlgrube" to premiere his first piano concerto in a minor key on February 11, 1785. His father Leopold listened and praised the work he had completed the day before. D minor, of all things: the key of the overture to "Don Giovanni" and then of course the "Requiem." No other concert so clearly marks Mozart's departure from all the pleasantness of everyday music, which he no longer satisfied. The concerto is one of his most profound, most passionate, and stark contrasts collide in pure theatricality! At the end, there is sunshine, as if a storm had never happened.


Symphoniker Hamburg

Dec 25, 2024

Bach, Vivaldi and Dvořák in the Great Hall of the Laeiszhalle

Dec 31, 2024 - Jan 1, 2025

A Hamburg tradition at the turn of the year

Jan 2 - Feb 2, 2025

Juris Stuffed Animal Concert

Jan 7, 2025

flute, clarinet, bassoon and horn

Jan 11, 2025

Bruch Violin Concerto and Brahms 2nd

Symphoniker Hamburg