Vladimir Jurowski conducts The Seven Last Words of Christ

“Essentially all thinking” consisted of “relating things to each other”, Arnold Schönberg once said. Conductor Vladimir Jurowski, born in Moscow, with Russian-Ukrainian roots, who emigrated to Berlin at the age of 18, has now curated and conducted a concert that is a “thinking” concert in this sense: it sets musical present and history in vibration, 1787 and 2023, but at the same time also feelings and thoughts, sounds and words. The main work of the evening is Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. But Haydn’s passion music isn’t performed as a complete whole. The seven movements are performed in alternation with six short orchestral pieces commissioned for this concert from composers based in countries where war or serious political crises are currently raging: Ukraine, Iran, but also Belarus and Russia. “Powerful, speaking music throughout” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

The Belcea Quartet performs Haydn, Ligeti & Dvorák

The Belcea Quartet, one of the world’s leading chamber music ensembles, lights up the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin with their exciting programme consisting of three string quartets from three different centuries. The hall with its perfect acoustics specifically caters to the needs of performers of chamber music and provides an intimate setting for the multinational quartet, here beautifully captured on film. Haydn’s 18th century masterpiece is followed by Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 and an atmospheric rendition of Dvorák’s so-called “American Quartet”. The musicians’ journey through the history of string quartets is rounded off by the encore “O Albion”, the sixth movement of contemporary English composer Thomas Adès’s String Quartet Op. 12 “Arcadiana”. “The Belcea Quartet searches and finds the essence of this music” (Der Tagesspiegel).

The Prokofiev Marathon

This suite of five concerts at Munich’s Philharmonic Hall performed by the Münchner Philharmoniker, the Mariinsky Orchestra and several soloists, forms part of the MPhil 360° Festival. The MPhil 360° Festival is a new festival which marks the beginning of Valery Gergiev’s collaboration with the Münchner Philharmoniker. Core of the program of the festival’s first edition are the five piano concertos of Prokofiev who enter into a dialogue with history and modern age. All of Prokofiev’s piano concertos are complemented by works of the German musical literature. PROGRAM: Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 1, Symphony No. 1, Haydn: Symphony No. 82

Pergolesi, Stabat Mater

When Anna Netrebko sings one of the most beautiful sacred works of the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s “Stabat mater”, many music lovers will see this as the highlight of the “Pergolesi year”. Her appearance together with contralto Marianna Pizzolato and with Bertrand de Billy at the head of the Sächsische Staatskapelle in Dresden’s exuberantly Baroque Frauenkirche radiates “nothing less than bewitching depth and beauty” (Morgenpost). In addition to the Pergolesi, the concert features an excerpt from Joseph Haydn’s “Sieben letzte Worte des Erlösers am Kreuze” as well as Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Erbarme Dich”.