Musikfest Berlin: Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Sobre o Evento

Berlin's new concert season starts with a big orchestral bang: from September 3rd to 21st the "musikfest berlin 09" takes place!

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Bernard Haitink performs works by Mozart and Shostakovich.

Shostakovich’s last symphony is an encounter with self‐alienating elements: Rossini, Wagner, twelve‐tone, Bach, the ticking of life‐support machines and an oblique illumination on his oeuvre. Not merely one epoch is represented – the beautiful, true world of music floats by. Shostakovich was able to cause wild turmoil with his music, but with his last symphony, he takes his time. He must have written it on the edge of eternity (which Stalinism would have liked to erase from human memory) – not, however, because of his illness, toward which he cultivated a sarcastic‐stoical calmness. While writing his Fifteenth, his constant companion was a novel by Anton Chekhov: The Black Monk, about a phantom figure, visiting mankind as a Fata Morgana every 1000 years. The novel’s effect is similar to that of good music: everyone perceives it, everyone is impressed by it, but remains immaterial, impossible to touch, yet comprehensible.



Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink conductor