The DSO and its Music Director Robin Ticciati will open their seventh season together at the Musikfest Berlin festival on 30 August with Gustav Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ (‘The Song of the Earth’), the enchanting song cycle based on free adaptations of ancient Chinese lyric poetry and directed towards the afterlife. The sound of the sheng, the ancient Chinese mouth organ, which Berlin-based composer Unsuk Chin allows to merge with the orchestra in her ‘Šu’ concert, is also downright celestial.
The Music Director then puts two legendary ninth symphonies on the programme only one week apart: Bruckner’s Ninth can be heard on 15 October in a rarely performed completion of the finale – after the German premiere of Camille Pépin’s new Violin Concerto, which the French composer wrote for Renaud Capuçon.
Beethoven’s Ninth follows only a week later, and between the movements, Navid Kermani reflects on its creation, humanism, and reception with his own texts. In the first part, Beethoven’s choral symphony is conceptually expanded by Helen Grime’s ‘Meditations on Joy’, a work commissioned by the DSO.
Robin Ticciati continues his Mahler cycle, which has already taken him to the First, Third, and Fourth Symphonies, with the Fifth Symphony on 17 November. He prefaces the legendary work with Elizabeth Ogonek’s ‘Ringing the Quiet’ – and John Adams’ minimalist, rhythmically driven orchestral piece ‘Fearful Symmetries’, which is translated into movement by ballet dancer Michèle Seydoux on the stage of the Philharmonie concert hall.
On 17 February, Ticciati celebrates a song of praise to the greatest of all human themes with two tragic romances and pairs of lovers who have shaped cultural history like no others: Romeo and Juliet as well as Tristan and Isolde – with the love scene from Berlioz’ dramatic symphony, the second act from Wagner’s music drama, and with a commissioned work by composer Charlotte Bray, which follows the traces of love into the present day.
Busoni’s monumental, highly romantic Piano Concerto with male choir is an absolute rarity on international programmes. Ticciati is presenting it twice – 100 years after Busoni’s death – together with pianist Benjamin Grosvenor: on 23 February moderated in the Casual Concert, on 24 February in combination with Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ Symphony and the Overture to Ethel Smyth’s opera ‘The Wreckers’, which rivals Busoni in terms of its powerful sound.
Romantic piano intoxication and breath-taking virtuosity can also be found in Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, which Kirill Gerstein will interpret on 15 and 16 March and discuss with Ticciati in the concert. It is framed “in French” by Lili Boulanger’s ‘D’un matin de Printemps’ and Maurice Ravel’s ballet music ‘Ma mère l’oye’.
The DSO Music Director and pianist legend Emanuel Ax will present a brilliant Viennese finale at the end of the season on 28 and 29 June – with a Sinfonia by Marianna von Martines, who took piano lessons from the young Haydn and later welcomed Mozart to her salon, with the latter’s late C major Piano Concerto, and with Haydn’s last of his ‘London Symphonies’, which brought him world fame far from home. Ticciati has the music of the First Viennese School once again performed on gut strings, thereby bringing the timbres of the late 18th century to life in an impressive way.