The 2021-22 Season

Concerts with Music Director Robin Ticciati

The DSO and their Music Director Robin Ticciati are embarking on their fifth joint season; after the compulsory interruption of the past months due to the Corona virus, it will be a season of hope, a new dawn. The Music Director’s concerts cover a differentiated spectrum from classical to experimental formats. Each one has its own inner tension. The season begins jointly with the Rundfunkchor Berlin as part of the Musikfest Berlin, placing the emphasis on Igor Stravinsky’s late work. Ticciati will trace the particular spirituality that characterised this citizen of the world’s last creative period, juxtaposing his ‘Requiem Canticles’ against the Adagio from Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony – the only movement the composer was able to complete before his death.

Programmatic Lines

A few days later, the Music Director and orchestra will continue their joint exploration of Anton Bruckner’s symphonic oeuvre with the Ninth Symphony, with which the composer reached the limits of his composing. Beethoven’s work is also increasingly in Ticciati’s focus. In November, he will juxtapose the fourth piano concerto – interpreted by Mitsuko Uchida – against Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony. He will shape the kick-off in Berlin to the anniversary tour with the ‘Eroica’ and Schumann’s piano concerto; Leif Ove Andsnes is the soloist. In March he will take up two programmatic lines with Brahms’ violin concerto and Elgar’s Second Symphony, having intensively followed the two composers’ work in the past years.

From Opera to Contemporary Music

The concertante opera performance is again an integral part of this season: Bartók’s one-act opera ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ – featuring Karen Cargill and Matthias Goerne – will be the high point of a spring programme spanning cineaste drama and contemporary folksong arrangement. Strauss’s ‘Alpine Symphony’, an ascent and descent transformed into music, will be accompanied by Reinhold Messner with texts of his own, an experiment developed during the pandemic for a music film that is now finding its way into the concert hall. A lecture evening with the mountaineer with Alpine-inspired chamber music kicks off the ‘Summit Meeting’ weekend. 

Contemporary music continues to play a significant role: with Klaus Lang’s luminously gleaming ‘Ionic Light’ (in the version for large orchestra) and Helen Grime’s ‘Meditations on Joy’, Robin Ticciati will conduct two premieres on his programmes, supplemented with compositions by Julian Anderson, George Benjamin and Peter Eötvös.

Topical Music

‘Neues vom Tage’ (News of the Day) is a concert format that will be tested in December for the first time. The unaccustomed experience from pandemic times, of having to – and being able to – pull together a concert programme within days, quite in contrast to the usual orchestra-playing practices, has proven to be a veritable driving force for innovation. Here it is given its own playground: the DSO and its Music Director will react at short notice to issues of the day that move people – those which art has something to say about.

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75 Years DSO

In November, an anniversary programme with Robin Ticciati commemorates the founding of the orchestra on 15 November 1946 by Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS, the radio and television station in Berlin’s American sector). It spans a vast panorama – from the 19th century to the present, harking back to the Renaissance, experiments with the perception of time, sideways glances to improvisation and jazz, views of the future of music and works by Benjamin, Chausson, Dvořák, Strauss and Vaughan Williams.

Key works from the orchestra’s history – such as Paul Dukas’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ – and music by composers like Bartók and Stravinsky, together with Korngold and Zemlinsky, for whose renaissance the DSO played a major role in the Fricsay years, can be found throughout the programmes of the anniversary season, like historical markers. 

The anniversary brochure ‘75 Jahre DSO’ [75 Years DSO], which will be published in August 2021, will also provide insights into the DSO’s past, present and future.