Programme Guide

The Los Angeles Times describes the tonal language of American composer Missy Mazzoli as “seductive, meditative, spiritually elusive and subversive”. Her work Orpheus Undone, which was originally conceived as ballet music, deals with the tragic death of Eurydice in the Orpheus legend.

Peter Eötvös was a long-standing artistic partner of the Berliner Philharmoniker. While still a child, the composer had the opportunity to get to know the pianist György Cziffra personally. The lives of the two Hungarian musicians were intertwined; Eötvös’s mother studied with Cziffra at the Academy of Music in Budapest in the 1930s. In 2020, Eötvös wrote the Piano Concerto Cziffra Psodia to mark the 100th anniversary of Cziffra’s birth, in which he attempted to depict his “rhapsodic, dramatic life”. The score features a cimbalom – a stringed instrument common in western Hungary that Cziffra’s father used to play.

Musicologist Thomas Brodhead sees Charles Ives’s profound and complex Fourth Symphony, which received little public recognition during the composer’s lifetime, as the “last great Romantic symphony”. In his search for new sound worlds, the American composer distorted sacred hymns and experimented with dissonances. “It’s a comedy”, said Ives, “the dream, or fantasy, ends with an interruption of reality”.

Jonathan Nott, music director of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, makes his debut conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker. He has already appeared many times on stage with Pierre-Laurent Aimard – a regular guest of the Philharmoniker.