BAMBERG, GERMANY – BAMBERG SYMPHONY – HAYDN, ADAMS, MUSSORGSKY

Bamberg Symphony
Semyon Bychkov, conductor

PROGRAMME
Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 44 in E minor, Hob. I:44 ‘Funeral Symphony’
John Adams: ‘Frenzy: a short symphony’
Modest Mussorgsky: ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ (orchestral version: Maurice Ravel)

VENUE NOTE
»Everything speaks when he brings his orchestra to life.« That was Ernst Ludwig Gerber’s opinion in 1790, expressed in his »Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler« (»Historical and Biographical Encyclopaedia of Composers«), regarding the works of Joseph Haydn. The emotional centre of Symphony No. 44 is the Adagio, hence the title »Trauer« (»Mourning«). The outer movements, however, are very different: a passionate movement to begin with and a finale with a furious dynamic. This is perfectly complemented by the following musical extravaganza by John Adams: »Frenzy« – and that is exactly how this 2023 piece sounds, manically circling around a melodic motif. The composer wrote in a commentary that, for him, the title word encapsulates the »overwhelming feeling« that »arises when we look at the world around us today – especially as it presents itself to us in our daily dose of digital news and information«. Finally, we play a masterpiece in which the movement of the listener – or rather, the viewer – has even been explicitly cast into sound: »Pictures at an Exhibition«, a piece about which Mussorgsky remarked in 1874, whilst creating it, that the »sounds and thoughts« had literally flown to him. Between the ten musical pictures, he inserted the popular »Promenade« melody – as if someone were moving from picture to picture in a gallery. The depiction of the Great Gate of Kiev with the festive ringing of bells at the end of the work was originally intended as a mythological-historical reference – in the present geopolitical situation, it now also stands for the resilience of the Ukrainian state capital.