Performers
Programme
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Anton Bruckner: one a Prussian Protestant, the other a Catholic Austrian. With the experienced maestro Marek Janowski conducting them in this programme, the spiritual attitude and musical style of these two great Romantics become all the more palpable.
Mendelssohn was characterised less by Prussian austerity or dramatic pathos than by his extensive education, his evangelical piety and, in musical terms, his adherence to classical form. The Violin Concerto is also marked by his mastery of form and his expansion of it with new elements. The three movements flow seamlessly, and the solo cadenza is in the middle of the first movement. For all its formal rigour, however, the magic of the melodies and harmonies prevails. We look forward to the return of our former Museum soloist Arabella Steinbacher with one of the most popular violin concertos in the repertoire.
Anton Bruckner created a whole new world in his symphonies, and especially in the Seventh. Inspired by Richard Wagner's tonal language, the Seventh builds up mountains of sound in long arcs, weaving in chants, chorales and funeral music, and culminating in radiant exaltation and redemption. The register changes and chorale quotations are evidence of Bruckner's origins on the church organ. The Seventh has thus been interpreted as a synthesis of two worlds, Bruckner's world of strict Catholic piety and the mystical experience of Wagner's world of sound.
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)