Eröffnungskonzert Musikfest Berlin 2025: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

In the organizer's words:

Luciano Berio's "Rendering" provides dream-like insights into Franz Schubert's inner world. The stylistically versatile and compositionally daring Italian composer has been reserved a special place in this year's festival program for his 100th anniversary year. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, for which Luciano Berio resurrected Schubert's vision of a 10th symphony, will open Musikfest Berlin 2025 together with its future chief conductor Klaus Mäkelä.

In the last weeks of his life, Franz Schubert sketched out a 10th symphony that was never completed. Based on the surviving sketches, Luciano Berio composed a "Ricomposizione" of this work in 1990, translating Schubert's expressive melodies into a dazzling orchestral language. However, the symphonic sketches also contain a number of gaps which Berio did not attempt to close as faithfully as possible, but which he filled with his own dreamlike sequences that suddenly and momentarily place the orchestral sound in a distant state of suspension. As with the restoration of a fresco, in which damage caused over the centuries is not completely concealed, the result is a work permeated by Schubert's thoughts and melodies with quotations and echoes from his late work.

Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra was premiered in Boston in 1944 to great acclaim and remains one of the Hungarian composer's most popular works to this day. Bartók spent the last years of his life - shortly after fleeing Hungary before the Second World War - in the USA. He composed the 5-movement commissioned work within a few months. A mysterious melody in the low strings, accompanied by eerie tremolos, opens the instrumental competition. The 2nd movement continues in a dance-like manner, introduced by a patchy drum solo and Bartók-typical melodies from the woodwind pairs. A sombre elegy conjures up the image of a cemetery at night, while irony and mockery are mixed into the music in the following intermezzo. The emotionally stirring and virtuoso journey through the possibilities of the orchestral sound ends rapidly in the triumphant Presto finale, crowned by wind fanfares.