Simon Rattle conducts a Beethoven evening in Taipei
A particularly warm relationship has developed between the Taiwanese audience and the Berliner Philharmoniker since their first guest appearance in 2005. For this guest performance at the Taipei National Concert Hall in May 2015, the orchestra and its chief conductor Sir Simon Rattle present Beethoven’s First and Ninth Symphony – effectively a highly concentrated substratum of the celebrated Beethoven cycle that shaped the Philharmoniker’s entire 2015/16 season.
The concert offers an exciting journey from Beethoven’s first symphonic work to his testament to the genre. Significantly, the First Symphony was first performed in 1800, exactly at the beginning of the new century and is, also programmatically, in C major, a key without accidentals. However, Beethoven only finds his way to this after a series of harmonic surprises in a slow introduction which is unconventional in every way. You can already admire in the work of the 30-year-old composer the consummate command of orchestration and the art of building a complex motivic system from simple blocks. Almost a quarter of a century later, Beethoven completed his last symphony. The finale is a revolutionary act in the history of the genre, not only through the use of voices, but also in the recurrence of themes from all previous movements. And the number nine was subsequently to become the magical barrier for the successive symphonists Bruckner, Dvořák and Mahler.
Berliner Philharmoniker
Sir Simon Rattle
Iwona Sobotka
Eva Vogel
Christian Elsner
Dimitry Ivashchenko
© 2016 Berlin Phil Media GmbH
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