Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: Musikfest Berlin

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Berlin's concert season will begin with a big bang: the "musikfest berlin 2011" will take place from the 2nd to the 20th of September.

At this concert, works by Mahler, Wagner and Rihm will be performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the renowned violinist, Anne‐Sophie Mutter, under the baton of Manfred Honeck.

Astonishing music for the beginning of an opera: instead of a conventional overture, a kind of programme music. In this prelude Wagner achieves something new, unlike anything ever heard before: something unearthly, music of the spheres that set new standards of expressivity.
Wolfgang Rihm’s violin concerto Gesungene Zeit (Time Chant) begins in almost unearthly heights. He wrote it for Anne‐Sophie Mutter, who gave the premiere and will perform it again at the musikfest berlin. The violin in Rihm’s concerto sings a kind of chant that carries on even in confrontation with the orchestra. “In essence, this is monophonic music,” he once remarked.
In his Fifth, Mahler is definitively revealed as the forerunner of modern music, if not of the post‐modern: disparate, fragmentary elements everywhere; internal contradictions left unresolved; military, funereal, folk, quotidian, even plaintive circus music; waltz rhythms, chorales and carnival noises – everything cheek by jowl under a spotlight. There is also, however, a haven of repose amidst the turbulence, an idyllic island: the Adagietto, a song without words for strings and harp. Luchino Visconti chose this music for his film of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to accompany a tale of decadence set against a cholera epidemic.