RCO Opening Night is the festive opening of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s new season in the company of loyal audience members and new friends. The fourth RCO Opening Night in the history of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is led by Thomas Hengelbrock. Pianist Evgeny Kissin, without a doubt one of the biggest piano players of our time – some say a living legend – is returning to the Concertgebouw Orchestra for the first time since 1994. He is playing the solo in Liszt’s First Piano Concerto. This concert, suffused with the spirit of Romanticism, opens with Berlioz’s concert overture Le Carnaval Romain with its beautiful English horn solo. Mendelssohn’s passionate ‘Italian’ symphony is flanked by works from beloved Italian operas, with several more musical surprises to follow.
The Mendelssohn Family – Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn
Together with the Israeli soprano Chen Reiss, the JCOM, conducted by Daniel Grossmann, discovers works by the fascinating composer Fanny Hensel and her famous brother Felix Mendelssohn. The congenial siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn took very different paths. While Fanny’s musical talent, according to her father, could only be “an adornment, never the basic bass of your being and doing”, Felix’s father, himself the son of the famous Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, paved the way for a career as a musician. Fanny was only allowed to compose and perform her works in private. Only in recent years have many of Fanny Hensel’s works been rediscovered. ” Soprano Chen Reiss agrees on this point, and brings her own beguiling brand of elegant, operatic flair to a new album.” (The Opera Queen)
Lucerne Festival 2017: Chailly conducts Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn
“What an evening. What a kickoff. The future of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra – it has now begun.” This is how Peter Hagmann of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung described Riccardo Chailly’s debut as the new artistic director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra last year. Chailly devoted himself in his second year in Lucerne to the works of composers that strongly influenced him during his conducting career. Among these are Felix Mendelssohn and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The program included Mendelssohn’s enchanting tone poems to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred Symphony”, based on the poem written by Lord Byron.
RCO: Christmas Matinee with Klaus Mäkelä
Klaus Mäkelä conducts the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s Christmas Matinee. This festive tradition has been a landmark of the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s season for almost fifty years. The Concertgebouw Orchestra’s future chief conductor conducts Beethoven’s magnificent ‘Eroica’ and works by no less than two Mendelssohns, Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn: PROGRAM Beethoven: Symphony No. 3; Felix Mendelssohn: The Hebrides, Infelice, Scherzo from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn: Hero und Leander
Nelsons conducts Mendelssohn & Schumann
Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhausorchester bring a programme rich in Leipzig’s unrivalled musical heritage to the Seoul Arts Center. Felix Mendelssohn, one of Nelsons’s celebrated predecessors as Gewandhauskapellmeister, is represented by his concert overture “Die schöne Melusine” and his atmospheric Symphony No. 3 “Scottish”, inspired by his travels in Britain in 1829 and premiered at the Gewandhaus in 1842. Three years later, Robert Schumann completed his piano concerto, one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire, and that work completes the programme here, performed by Seong-Jin Cho, one of the most celebrated pianists of his generation. PROGRAM Schumann:
Andris Nelsons and Lucas & Arthur Jussen
In this concert from the state-of-the-art Konzerthaus Dortmund, Lucas and Arthur Jussen join the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Gewandhauskapellmeister Andris Nelsons for a rare performance of the brilliant concerto for two pianos and orchestra by the 14-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, himself Gewandhauskapellmeister from 1835 to 1847. To complete the programme, orchestra and conductor present first another rarity – the beautiful “Blumine” movement composed for the original version of Mahler’s
Symphony No. 1 – alongside Dvorák’s life-enhancing Symphony No. 8, a work in which the composer’s symphonic skill and melodic gifts mix to irresistible effect. PROGRAM Mahler: Blumine; Mendelssohn: Concerto for two Pianos; Dvorák: Symphony No. 8