2024 New Year’s Eve Concert with Kirill Petrenko and Daniil Trifonov
“He has everything and more – tenderness and also the demonic element. I never heard anything like that,” as Martha Argerich once said of Daniil Trifonov. To celebrate the end of the year, the star pianist performed Johannes Brahms’s monumental Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko. With the prelude to Wagner’s Meistersinger, dazzling waltzes from Strauss’s Rosenkavalier and the sensual veil dance from Salome, the concert ended with fantastic operatic highlights – described by the Tagesspiegel as “intoxicating in the best sense of the word”.
Johannes Brahms from Hamburg and Richard Strauss from Munich were both closely associated with Vienna: Brahms found his adopted home here from 1871, and Strauss not only served for a time as head of the famous Hofoper, but also wrote Der Rosenkavalier, probably the most “Viennese” opera in music history. In this concert, the finale from Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, which echoes the Hungarian tone so popular in the Habsburg metropolis, and superbly orchestrated waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier both radiate distinctly local colour.
Daniil Trifonov, who was the orchestra’s Artist in Residence in the 2018/19 season, is the soloist in one of the most demanding piano concertos of the 19th century. The fact that Brahms conceived it as the only one of his concertos in four movements points to the symphonic genre, and has an expressive spectrum that is just as broad: it ranges from a restrained, mysterious dialogue between the horn and piano, the impassioned second movement and the dreamy andante with its magnificent cello solo, to the sparkling finale.
After the opulent Meistersinger prelude by Richard Wagner, opera specialist Kirill Petrenko brings a dance-like atmosphere to the Philharmonie. In the second waltz sequence from Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss himself brought together highlights from the last act of his opera. A completely different, oriental-inspired atmosphere characterises the dance scene from the finale of Salome. The stage work – whose Dresden premiere in 2006 was a succès de scandale – established the reputation of opera composer Richard Strauss.
Berliner Philharmoniker
Kirill Petrenko
Daniil Trifonov
© 2024 Berlin Phil Media GmbH
Category
Artists
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