As the year draws to a close, Hamburg bursts into life with a series of spectacular musical events hosted by Symphoniker Hamburg at the iconic Laeiszhalle. The lineup features a blend of timeless classics and innovative performances, offering something for everyone. From Beethoven's transformative Ninth Symphony to intimate chamber music sessions and delightful children's concerts, these events promise to captivate audiences and celebrate the universal language of music. With renowned artists and conductors gracing the stage, this year-end musical extravaganza is poised to leave an indelible mark.

A Symphony of Traditions: Hamburg's Year-End Musical Extravaganza

The Symphoniker Hamburg has curated an array of exceptional events, each offering a unique experience for music enthusiasts and casual listeners alike. From the whimsical Juris Stuffed Animal Concert to the vibrant sounds of Michel Camilo, these events encapsulate a range of musical genres and emotional depths. Held at the iconic Laeiszhalle Hamburg, these concerts promise an immersive experience, whether you're exploring classical masterpieces, jazz innovations, or exciting children's performances. Join us as we delve into these captivating events, celebrating creativity and cultural richness.

Symphoniker Hamburg: A Journey Through Music and Culture

Hamburg's Laeiszhalle is set to host a series of captivating musical events, showcasing a diverse range of performances that promise to captivate audiences with their rich narratives and dynamic compositions. From operatic tales of human drama to orchestral adventures with mythical creatures, each event offers a unique glimpse into the world of classical music. The Symphoniker Hamburg orchestrates these events with a blend of traditional and contemporary works, ensuring a memorable experience for music lovers of all ages.

A Symphony of Drama, Adventure, and Play: Hamburg's Musical Extravaganza

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.

Four double basses

Laeiszhalle Hamburg

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

Yet another prince looking for true love. More by accident, though, because Prince Ivan actually wants to catch the famous firebird. This feathery fluttering creature is said to have magical powers. But he has his own idea of ​​what the event will be like - after all, he is not made for a life in a golden cage. Unfortunately, the evil magician Kastschej gets in the way of the prince's plans. It's going to be exciting! So exciting that Igor Stravinsky wrote stirring music for it. So that we always know what's going on, Anna-Maria and Malte tell us about this exciting adventure. Here and there you even have to help the prince, otherwise there will be no fire, bird or wedding...

The Firebird

Returning opera to its origins, where human drama is the focus, where passion, strokes of fate and deep feelings are the focus, where music and words can respect each other as equal arts: these were the aims of an opera reform to which Gluck was committed. "Alceste" is a particularly impressive example, because with it Gluck succeeds in making the overture a part of the opera itself by preparing the audience for everything that is to come. From the particularly tragic key of D minor, from the countless sighing motifs, the constant downward movement and the painful dissonances, even the most hardened audience knows that something tragic is about to happen. Thankfully, the opera ends with a happy ending.

Cambreling – Gluck, Mozart, Liszt and Wagner

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

Academics of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra

Francis Poulenc, the real joker of the Groupe des Six, created a precious treasure of five works for the woodwinds - the sextet, a trio and a sonata each for flute, clarinet and bassoon. With the sparkling Sextuor for piano and winds, a showcase for the "musical prose" sought by the Six, he thrusts us into the heart of the pulsating life of his hometown of Paris. The three-movement piece was completed in 1932, but was thoroughly revised in 1939 for the performance with Poulenc himself at the piano. At the beginning it sounds like the Grands Boulevards, everything is noisy, running, honking, shouting and whirling around, and immediately the woodwinds are allowed to bring their entire arsenal of modern acrobatics into play. The middle movement is more idyllic, before the fast section suddenly seems to be a fairground bustle. The work concludes with a hymnic declaration of love to the Seine metropolis.

sextet, octet and nonet

Rachmaninoff had already been living with his wife on Lake Lucerne in his newly built villa "Senar" (Sergei & Natalia Rachmaninoff) for four years when he composed his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini in 1934. The theme comes from the last of the 24 Caprices for solo violin, which are so technically tricky that they contributed significantly to Paganini's reputation as a devil's violinist. The curious list of composers who have been inspired by Paganini's theme ranges from Brahms and Liszt to Szymanowski and Blacher to Lutosławski and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Rachmaninoff uses the theme as the starting material for a series of 24 variations with introduction and coda, ingeniously combining the structure of the work with that of a three-movement concerto. Adaptations of the opulent 18th Variation (in the rare key of D flat major) can be found in films as well as in pop songs and video games. In the seventh variation, Rachmaninoff also introduces the "Dies irae" - a cross-reference that appears like a signature in many of his works and also recurs at the end of the variations.

Harry Ogg – Elgar's Symphony No. 2

violin and cello

Helau and hurray! Confetti, streamers and costumes - all of this is part of a successful carnival party. And of course, rousing music. The Hamburg Symphony Orchestra celebrates a party full of gripping rhythms and fantastically beautiful melodies with presenter Singa Gätgens. Our wild carnival concert naturally begins with a real classic: the overture from the operetta "Die Fledermaus" by Johann Strauss. The piece takes place at a masked ball and is full of funny misunderstandings and mix-ups. Wigs, make-up and weird clothes are also expressly welcome in the audience at this concert.

Singa's colorful carnival concert

The extraordinary Dominican composer and pianist Michel Camilo is a Grammy, Latin Grammy and Emmy award winner and has been honored with other awards such as honorary doctorates and professorships. With his brilliant artistry and technical virtuosity, Camilo travels through the genres of jazz, classical, popular music and world music on 88 keys, combining them all with a Caribbean flair. Almost 30 albums have now been released in a wide variety of formations; he has recorded them as a soloist, in a duo, in a trio, in a sextet, with a big band and with symphony orchestras. In this concert he will appear both alone on the grand piano and as the soloist in his energetic Piano Concerto No. 1 from 2006, in which jazz and classical music form a unique fusion through rhythmic complexity and melodic variety.

Michel Camilo in the Elbphilharmonie

Galina Ustvolskaya was a woman whose work was characterized by ascetic contemplation and uncompromising outbursts. From 1937 to 1947 she studied at the conservatory in her hometown of Leningrad, where Dmitri Shostakovich was not only one of her most important teachers, but also one of her great admirers. Shostakovich is quoted as saying that he was just a talent, she was a phenomenon. Until the end, the composer lived a secluded life and avoided any publicity. "I write when I am in a state of grace. Then the work rests for a while, and when its time comes, I release it. If its time does not come, I destroy it." After 1990, the composer did not release a single further work for performance until her death in 2006.

Cambreling – Verdi Requiem

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 »Messa da Requiem«

concertmaster recital

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.


Han-Na Chang – Shostakovich 10.

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”

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.

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

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

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

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

flute, clarinet, bassoon and horn

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

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

It is all so heartbreakingly tragicomic, tears roll alternately from laughing and crying. An hour and a half of being overwhelmed by images and sounds, yet so lovingly everyday, so not even worth mentioning: No, he is still mute, the Tramp, even though talkies have long since conquered the screen. Words are used as sounds. A major exception is Léo Daniderff's hit song "Titina", which the protagonist sings towards the end of the film "Modern Times". A chanson, so important simply because in 1936 the world was able to hear the voice of the little tramp for the first time: Chaplin sings! 

Charlie Chaplin: “Modern Times”

Mozart's "little" G minor Symphony - the work of a seventeen-year-old - has already become known to many people in the world: in Miloš Forman's 1984 film "Amadeus". Ten years after its creation, Mozart himself valued the work highly enough to ask his father to send him the sheet music, probably for a performance in Vienna. He completed his first minor-key work of this genre on October 5, 1773 - after returning from his third trip to Italy, which he had undertaken together with his father Leopold. Joseph Haydn's 39th Symphony of 1768/69 was a model for him, both in terms of the key and in the then rare instrumentation of four horns. The second, the "great" G minor Symphony KV 550, followed in 1788.

Han-Na Chang – Mahler 5.

»My music is something like a signal into the unknown. What's more, I imagine and believe that my signal meets other signals and that the resulting physical changes create a new harmony.« The two »Signals« by the Japanese autodidact Tōru Takemitsu (both commissioned in 1987) are characterized by the alternation of question and answer, similar to the model of early Venetian church music. And so the wind ensemble is spatially separated from one another for the musical dialogue. »Nature and Duke Ellington were my teachers,« he is said to have once said; and we also hear the latter - alongside Takemitsu's other teacher, Messiaen - in the »Signals from Heaven«.

Cambreling – Takemitsu, Mozart, Dvořák, Shchedrin

Instrumentation details. The tourist was Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the key was B minor, the sketched work was the overture "The Hebrides", which was not completed until three and a half years later. On the trip, Mendelssohn Bartholdy had visited the island of Staffa with its legendary Fingal's Cave, but also experienced "the most horrible seasickness". The first version of the overture was written in Rome at the end of 1830, and Hector Berlioz, who was staying there, admiringly described it as a "delicate, fine musical fabric" that was "decorated with such rich colors". In 1832, Mendelssohn Bartholdy wrote from London during the premiere: "I have now made the Hebrides significantly different and better." A third, slightly shortened version was printed.

Elina Vähälä plays Britten Violin Concerto

The idea is said to have come to him when he was in a Paris taxi and remembered how he had heard the stentorian voices of the croupiers in the casino during a holiday in a German spa town. According to his own words, Stravinsky had been thinking for many years about composing a ballet on the subject of the card game, which he himself had a great fondness for. During his second stay in America in 1935, during which he appeared both as a conductor and as an interpreter of his own works, a commission for ballet music came at a very convenient time. »Jeu de cartes« was created as a stage play about the card game (dancers costumed as playing cards), but also as a compositional game: we encounter a wealth of quotations - Rossini's »Barber« overture, Strauss's »Fledermaus«, »La Valse« by Ravel, Beethoven, jazz, dance rhythms and quotations from Stravinsky's own works.

Mozart's Clarinet Concerto with David Orlowsky and Schubert's "Tragic"

string quartet

Haggai Cohen-Milo Volume X "The Song of the Earth"

"This was my first work played by an orchestra and my first contact with a large audience. I was 22 years old at the time," reports Olivier Messiaen. "Les offrandes oubliées" (The Forgotten Offerings) was composed in 1930 and premiered on February 19, 1931 in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées by the Orchestre des concerts Straram under the direction of its boss and namesake, Walther Straram. The "symphonic meditation" (as the subtitle says) is based on linguistically comprehensible but abstract ideas. The texts were written by Messiaen himself. The themes of the three verses (cross - sin - Eucharist) can be understood as situations of contemplation, descent and rapture and form the three sections of the work.

Sylvain Cambreling, Szymon Nehring, Jane Archibald – Messiaen, Bellini, Chopin

"From the canyons to the stars... This means rising from the depths of the canyons up to the stars - and even higher up to the resurrected of paradise - to praise God and the abundance of his creations: the beauties of the earth (its rocks, its birdsong), the beauties of the visible sky, the beauties of the spiritual sky," writes Olivier Messiaen in the prologue to the score of "Des Canyons aux étoiles...".

Cambreling – Messiaen »Des canyons aux étoiles…«

Completely removed from the sophisticated hustle and bustle of the spa town of Baden-Baden, nestled in a modest home in the suburb of Lichtental close to the forest as he always did in summer, Johannes Brahms came up with the theme for the first movement of the Horn Trio on one of his beloved morning walks in the forest: a gentle circle first around the note F, then ever more circling in its melody. Later he would even lead a friend to the place where the sound of nature had caught him inside. The instruments that Brahms had learned as a child in Hamburg included the piano and cello as well as the French horn. It is no coincidence that Brahms continued to feature the horn very prominently in his music later on – it is not difficult to find corresponding passages in the symphonies in particular; but the early songs for women's choir, two horns and harp op. 17 should also be mentioned. It was his mother who loved Johannes' horn playing in particular. The question of the extent to which the death of the mother Christiane, who died in February 1865, actually influenced the composition of the Adagio movement for the horn trio a few months later keeps cropping up with strange persistence. However, it seems presumptuous to continue to rack one's brains here in Brahms' name. Mesto (sad) is written in the score, and that is how the movement sounds. And the whole trio is "an incomparable work of this chamber music genre, [that] floats in musical heaven," says György Ligeti.

Brahms

Mysterious deaths are not uncommon in classical music! Murder and manslaughter are the order of the day. Heads roll, people are shot, hanged and poisoned. In this crime concert, things get completely out of hand and the boundaries between fiction and reality become blurred.

Murder Backstage

Far out in the depths of the ocean lives a little mermaid. Her heart is full of courage, hope and endless longing. She wants to leave her carefree life as a sea princess behind her for a new, mysterious world on land. A captivating fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, told in a fresh and contemporary way by KiKA presenter Juri Tetzlaff. With touching twists, goosebumps-inducing moments and exciting opportunities for young audiences to take part. An artistic treat for classical music fans of all ages and those who want to become one. With infectious joy of playing and enthusiasm for storytelling, a fantastic concert experience is created for the whole family!

Symphoniker Hamburg

Apr 17, 2025

Charlie Chaplin: “Modern Times”

Apr 27, 2025

Han-Na Chang – Mahler 5.

May 6, 2025

Cambreling – Takemitsu, Mozart, Dvořák, Shchedrin

May 8, 2025

Elina Vähälä plays Britten Violin Concerto

10 - 11 May, 2025

Juris Stuffed Animal Concert

Apr 8, 2025

Four double basses

5 - 6 Apr, 2025

Juris Stuffed Animal Concert

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