“Why have you lived? Why have you suffered?” These are elemental questions that Gustav Mahler raises in his Second Symphony. He summons up impressive forces with chorus and orchestra. Grotesque humour and yearning solo voices are also heard within this immense expressive spectrum. The conductor is Gustavo Dudamel, who has appeared regularly with the Berliner Philharmoniker as a Mahler interpreter and thrills listeners with his enthusiasm and precision.

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Gustavo Dudamel conducts Mahler’s Second Symphony

Philharmonie

Jean-Christophe Spinosi’s artistic home is music of the 17th and 18th centuries. He also appears as an opera conductor, with acclaimed interpretations of works by Mozart and Rossini. For his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker Spinosi has put together a varied programme including two works from the Baroque period, a symphony from the Viennese Classical School and Romantic bel canto. Philippe Jaroussky is also at home in this repertoire and contributes arias by Vivaldi and Rossini in his brilliant countertenor.

Jean-Christophe Spinosi and Philippe Jaroussky

In addition to a tendency towards taciturnity – a trait often attributed to Northern Europeans – Johannes Brahms and Jean Sibelius were also both convinced that programmes should be dispensed with when composing symphonies. Even without extramusical associations, however, every contribution of the two composers to this genre is characterized by a strong, individual profile. Brahms’s Third Symphony is distinguished by its alternation between major and minor, as well as the stark contrast between the dramatic force of the outer movements and the intermezzo character of the middle movements. Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, which many experts consider his most important, is marked by fragmentary motifs, dissonant harmony and an uncompromisingly tragic mood. Whereas Brahms’s Third dies away in <em>p</em><em>iano</em>, Sibelius’s Fourth breaks off abruptly at the end. Brahms conducted his F major Symphony himself during a concert of the Berliner Philharmoniker shortly after its premiere in 1884 – “from the manuscript”, according to the archives, since it was not printed until several months later. 

Herbert Blomstedt conducts Sibelius and Brahms

Something magical happens in the nursery at midnight: a magic fairy brings the two children’s toys to life with her song, resulting in chaos. Whether jumping jack, princess or dinosaur, all of them suddenly have a mind of their own. The teddy bear does a tap dance, and the puppets dance too! Sleep is out of the question. Kurt Weill’s children’s pantomime <em>Zaubernacht</em> (Magic Night) invites young and old to dreams and astonishment, with enchanting music and rousing dance rhythms

“Magic Night”

In 2006, Sunwook Kim won the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition – just 18 years old and the first Asian pianist to do so. With his colourful, virtuosic style of music-making, the South Korean soon found an international audience. He now makes his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker with Unsuk Chin’s brilliant and rhythmically challenging Piano Concerto. Sakari Oramo also conducts Sibelius’s mystical and poetic Second Symphony.

Sakari Oramo conducts Chin and Sibelius

Simon Rattle conducts Ginastera and Britten

Alban Berg described his <em>Lyric Suite</em> as a “small monument to a great love”. In it, the composer musically encoded his passion for the married Hanna Fuchs, interweaving the tonal equivalents of the initials of them both, creating a highly personal piece of programme music. Beethoven’s symphony known as the “Pastoral” is also programme music, in which he expresses his love for nature – with bird calls, the splashing of streams and thunderstorms. A joyful homage to country life, conducted by Daniel Harding to mark the Beethoven anniversary year. </p></div></div></article><h3>About the music</h3><article><div><h1>Storms of Emotion</h1><p>When Alban Berg set out for the International Music Festival in Prague in May of 1925 at the invitation of Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, he could not have anticipated that this journey would provoke an emotional storm in him: “I am no longer myself since this greatest of events,” he confessed to his hostess later. “One thought alone animates me, one desire, one longing: you!” The secret love affair continued until the end of the year – in <strong>Berg’s </strong><em>Lyric Suite</em> it reverberates until today. </p><p>Not until the letters between Berg and his “eternal love” as well as a score with handwritten notes by the composer were discovered in the 1970s did the work reveal its explosive secret programme. The title is a reminiscence of the song cycle <em>Lyric Symphony</em> by Alexander von Zemlinsky, to whom the <em>Lyric Suite</em> is dedicated. Berg set the stirring memories of his fateful encounter to music under the guise of an ostensibly innocuous string quartet.</p><h3>A brief liaison</h3><p>While the six highly expressive movements of the quartet capture this encounter in its entirety, from the carefree first meeting to the painful separation, the second, third and fourth movements, arranged for string orchestra by the composer in 1927, explore the amorous centrepiece of the brief liaison, climaxing with the passionate declaration of love in the Trio estatico. Disguising the work as an homage to his friend Zemlinsky, Berg twice quotes a melody from the <em>Lyric Symphony</em> to the words “You are my own”, and even the most nit-picking analysts were not able to discover the initials HF and AB woven throughout the intricate twelve-tone movement without the annotated score.</p><h3>“More an expression of feeling than painting”</h3><p>One of the first works to add lyrical content to abstract music was Ludwig van <strong>Be</strong><strong>ethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony</strong>. Its programme was never a secret, however, but was already made public at its premiere under the title “Recollections of Country Life”. A contemporary critic reacted with astonishment and slight displeasure: “The path that [Beethoven] maps out is eccentric: he raises us above the ordinary and transports us, though rather roughly at times, into the realm of fantasy.” For Beethoven himself the composition of the “Pastoral” was a balancing act in which the music was never intended to be a mere illustration of the programme. Although he dared to imitate the calls of the cuckoo, quail and nightingale quite naturalistically, a musical menagerie such as that heard in Haydn’s <em>Creation</em> would never have occurred to him. Accordingly, he made it clear in the programme note for the premiere that the symphony was “more an expression of feeling than painting”.</p><p>It was no coincidence that Beethoven’s Fifth, known as the “Fate Symphony”, was performed at the same concert. He had worked on both symphonies at the same time, and they are complementary siblings: whereas the Fifth insistently builds up momentum until its triumphant finale, the relaxed flow of the “Pastoral” conveys tranquillity and expansiveness. The two symphonies were still played in reverse order in December of 1808; only later did Beethoven change their numbering. The turbulent introspection of the personal struggle with fate thus finds its energetic counterweight in the liberating external perspective of a universal experience of nature, which ends with “happy and thankful feelings after the storm”.

Harding conducts Berg and Beethoven

Kirill Petrenko, chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, opens the 2020/21 concert season with a programme that combines two cross-seasonal focal points of his work with the orchestra: the cultivation of the Classical-Romantic core repertoire with Johannes Brahms’s melancholy, profound Fourth Symphony, and the music of composers of the Second Viennese School with <em>Verklärte Nacht</em>, a youthful work by Arnold Schoenberg that is still entirely in the tradition of late Romanticism. It was inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel, which is a homage to free love.

Berliner Philharmoniker

25 - 27 Feb, 2022

Gustavo Dudamel conducts Mahler’s Second Symphony

17 - 19 Jun, 2021

Jean-Christophe Spinosi and Philippe Jaroussky

10 - 12 Jun, 2021

Herbert Blomstedt conducts Sibelius and Brahms

5 - 6 Jun, 2021

“Magic Night”

3 - 5 Jun, 2021

Sakari Oramo conducts Chin and Sibelius

Berliner Philharmoniker

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