The 2011 New Year’s Eve Concert with Simon Rattle and Evgeny Kissin

To mark the end of 2011 in the Berlin Philharmonie, Simon Rattle conducted dance music of a particularly discerning kind by Dvořák, Grieg, Ravel, Strauss, Stravinsky and Brahms. There was also a highlight for all piano fans: Grieg’s Piano Concerto with Evgeny Kissin – one of the great musical personalities of the present day. His playing blends the richness of sound and soul of the old Russian school of pianists with taut energy and intelligent interpretation.

It was also a New Year’s Eve Concert in which Evgeny Kissin made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1988 – then under Herbert von Karajan – with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Twenty-three years later the former child prodigy Kissin shows that even at the age of forty he is still a force of nature at the keyboard. According to the critic of Der Tagesspiegel, it seemed “as if it was not hammers striking against steel strings but, rather, that Kissin was literally moulding the music with his hands, shaping and chiselling the raw material, driving waves of sound before him, allowing the notes to drain away, striking individual notes as if they were nails, and emptying a box of glass marbles. Tremendous applause.”

Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances and Brahms’s Hungarian Dances feature regularly on the orchestra’s New Year’s Eve programmes under Sir Simon Rattle. In 2011 they were complemented by Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso, by the Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss’s opera Salome and by excerpts from Stravinsky’s The Firebird. Here the bassoonist Stefan Schweigert and the oboist Albrecht Mayer were able to demonstrate their brilliance with thrilling solos before the orchestra brought the proceedings to a lively conclusion with two encores, sending their audience out into the night with terpsichorean abandon.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Sir Simon Rattle

Evgeny Kissin