Concert introduction at 19:00 in the Great Hall
Schönberg belonged in a lunatic asylum, with music paper absolutely out of his reach - that was what one critic demanded after the premiere of the tone poem "Pelleas and Melisande". The year was 1905, and the Viennese music world was thinking big. And big it is, this monumentally scored orchestral piece by Arnold Schoenberg, who was still clearly fired by late Romanticism: lushly polyphonic, powerfully complex and tremendously colourful. That the work is constructed like a symphony was later discovered by Alban Berg - who gave his teacher Schönberg the three orchestral pieces of Opus 6 as a 40th birthday present. Also 120 years before "Pelleas," a Viennese was thinking big, dramatic and palpably theatrical: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his Piano Concerto K. 466 in a somber D minor, and audiences turned away from it in horror. Where earlier gallant-playfulness determined the keynote, here an atmosphere of evil, abysmal prevails, a "Don Giovanni" mood in fact. Hellish, rich in contrast and no less extreme. It is a programme of hard cuts and contrasts with music from a time of upheaval. It is presented by the principal conductor of the Orquesta Nacional de España and one of the great pianists of our time.
Text source and further information about this event: https://www.alteoper.de/de/programm/veranstaltung.php?id=521194471
