Tchaikovsky: Pathéthique im Wiener Musikverein

About the Event

Three works that touch the heart in very different ways because they express the inexpressible: Tabita Berglund returns to the Tonkünstler Orchestra with a particularly gripping program. She first appeared at the podium as a substitute conductor in 2022, and since then the Norwegian conductor has long been a welcome guest with both the orchestra and the audience. With Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Sixth, his “Pathétique,” she now presents a symphony characterized by exorbitant emotional eruptions and sudden mood swings. Planned by the 53‐year‐old composer as the keystone of his oeuvre, it is a kind of requiem, a farewell to life accepted after struggles: nine days after its premiere, he was dead. In contrast, Krzysztof Penderecki's “Threnody,” an oppressive lament for string orchestra dedicated to the victims of the first atomic bomb dropped in 1945, is a monument to public remembrance of the dead. Arvo Pärt's “Tabula Rasa” follows as a kind of composed silence: its transcendental calm and introverted, austere beauty demands enormous concentration from the musicians, albeit of a completely different kind.

Wiener Musikverein

The Wiener Musikverein is one of the world's great concert halls. The home of the Vienna Philarmonic Orchestra and the centre of Viennese musical life, the building was opened in 1870 as a part of an ambitious plan to create an elegant cultural boulevard along the Ringstrasse. Designed in the Neo‐Classical style to resemble an Ancient Greek temple, the Great Hall of the Musikverein is deemed to be one of the best music halls in the world thanks to its impeccable acoustics.
In 2004 four new halls were added to the building. The Austrian architect Wilhelm Holzbauer recognised the aesthetic importance of the existing building and sought out ways to echo the style in a modern language of form. Each of the four New Halls focuses on a different material — glass, metal, stone, and wood.