The highly-regarded NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, conducted by Alan Gilbert, are to give two concerts during the Festival. In the first half of this, the first of their two performances, they will accompany the German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann in the 1878 Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 77, by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). This three-movement work, commonly acknowledged to be one of the greatest of all violin concerti, was dedicated to Brahms’s friend Joseph Joachim, a violin virtuoso who helped the composer with the writing of the solo violin part (though not all his advice was heeded).
In the second half, they will play Tchaikovsky’s four-movement Symphony No 4, written in the years 1877-78. The composer described the fanfare at the opening of the first movement, a metaphor for Fate, as ‘the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought of the whole symphony,’ saying that the programme of this movement is ‘roughly’ that ‘all life is an unbroken alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness.’ He then went on to say that ‘No haven exists … Drift upon that sea until it engulfs you and submerges you in its depths’. Although the second movement continues the melancholy atmosphere, the third and fourth are much lighter in mood, and the work has a triumphant conclusion.
The NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, founded in Hamburg in 1945 as the ‘North German Radio Symphony Orchestra’, was founded by the British authorities after World War II in Hamburg, the location of the only radio station in the future West Germany that had not been destroyed in the war.
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
