Daniel Barenboim and Maria João Pires

in cooperation with BERLIN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

Programme
 
Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 95 in C minor (23 min.) 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in G major, op. 58 (39 min.)
Maria João Pires piano
 
Robert Schumann
Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), op. 82: Der Vogel als Prophet (4 min.)
Maria João Pires piano
 
Robert Schumann
Symphony No. 4 in D minor, op. 120 (second version from 1851) (39 min.) 

Goethe-Institut invites the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to its auditorium in a digital format with high definition video live-streaming for the connoisseurs of Western classical music of Chennai. The Digital Concert Hall with excellent sound and video is the best close-to-real experience one can get.
 
This concert is of a special significance to a great friend of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Daniel Barenboim as he celebrates his golden jubilee anniversary. Daniel Barenboim conducted the orchestra for the first time 50 years ago with the same concert repertoire to be heard once again, works of Haydn, Beethoven and Schumann with Maria João Pires as the soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4.
 
London in a minor key – Haydn’s Symphony No. 95 in C minor
 
The concert opens with Symphony No. 95 in C minor by Joseph Haydn, who was acclaimed by the London Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser in early 1785 as the “Shakespeare of music”. The work reflected the ideas of grandeur, magnificence and majesty that Haydn’s English contemporaries associated with his music. The opening bars of this “New Grand Overture”, as the symphony was advertised on the playbill, already begin with a grand theatrical gesture that seems to shout “curtain up!” or “attention!” but this almost menacingly striking signal, played fortissimo and in unison, does not even last two bars, then the silence of a general pause falls over the hall and the astonished audience. The C minor Symphony bewilders its listeners, then and now, with incredibly varied music; again and again it catches its musical breath, the tone changes from the predominant genre pathétique to a Watteauesque stylized melancholy, from symphonic furor to concertante interplay with delicate, often surprising solos by the violin and particularly the cello, from Baroque fugal erudition to galant, witty conversation. The striking unison motif has scarcely resounded, however, before it ends in a general pause. The incredibly varied music that follows is also astonishing, since Haydn was trying to “surprise the public with something new and make a brilliant debut” which is why he repeatedly broke aesthetic norms with intellectual calculation.
 
 
A poem at the same time –Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58
 
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 was composed in 1805/1806, in chronological proximity to the Fifth Symphony, and in fact one motif is common to both works, the most famous motif of all: short – short – short – long. Unlike the C minor Symphony, however, whose opening Allegro con brio is dominated with almost totalitarian force by this elemental rhythmic formula (“Thus Fate knocks at the door!”), in the Fourth Piano Concerto a first movement with a completely different stylistic tone and mentality unfolds. It is “simple, peaceful, cheerful and relaxed”. Beethoven made an unprecedented and astonishing impression with this new composition by conceiving the opening bars as a piano solo, in a deliberate break with generic tradition, thus giving the pianist precedence over the orchestra with a restrained, tentative, thoughtful introduction. Beethoven thus brings an element of intimacy, individuality and sensitivity into the genre of the concerto, which is traditionally understood as extroverted, public and festive. The second movement also confirms dramaturgical contrasts of harsh objectivity versus lyrical subjectivity. When the tranquil, inspired song has prevailed over the impersonal rigidity and severity of the orchestral tutti at the end of this “scene”, the piano finally reveals itself as the voice of human individuality, with which it speaks literally from the first bar in this concerto. Adolf Bernhard Marx, a music theorist and critic, said “It is one of the most beautiful and most pleasing concertos, but at the same time it is a poem”.
 
Robert’s Mind – Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor, op. 120
 
Robert Schumann’s Fourth Symphony a work supposed to have emerged from the depths of his soul, did not achieve the hoped-for success at its premiere in Leipzig on 6 December 1841. Schumann set the symphony aside for almost exactly ten years, then revised it so substantially in December 1851 that a new score became necessary. The Düsseldorf premiere of the revised version was greeted with enthusiasm, which Schumann explained thus to his friend Johann Verhulst: “In any case I have completely re-orchestrated the symphony, and frankly it is much better and more effective than before.”