Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester

Music is always a mirror of its time. Bernstein's Age of Anxiety, composed between 1947 and 1949 and based on a poem by the British poet Wystan Hugh Auden, describes the uncertain and changeable attitude to life of people after the Second World War. The poem tells the story of four young people who wash down their fears and feelings of loneliness in a New York bar with copious amounts of alcohol, enter into changing relationships and desperately seek stability and faith in a world that has become strange.
Bernstein's symphony with solo piano - he could also have called it a piano concerto - adheres closely to the poem. The prologue in the bar is followed by five movements in which the four characters get drunk, drive through the city, celebrate together and part ways at the end. The music is eclectic and contains elements of jazz as well as echoes of Ravel, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Gershwin.
As the nickname 'Pastoral' suggests, Ludwig van Beethoven's 6th Symphony is usually interpreted as a cheerful, idyllic country symphony. The fact that it was composed at the same time as the Symphony No. 5 in C minor shows that it is not an expression of the composer's enduring cheerfulness. The external circumstances were far from idyllic. It was the time of the Coalition Wars, Vienna had been occupied by French troops in 1805 and Beethoven was struggling with his personal and family problems. With the cheerful country life of the 'Pastorale', he also created a contrast to the personal and political threats and upheavals of his time.
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)