1. Academy Concert: Vladimir Jurowski

31. October and 1. November 2025 in the Nationaltheater:

The orchestral prelude to Modest P. Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina opera is also known as “Dawn on the Moskva River”.  Will it be another gloomy day or will the skies clear and brighten above the world?  GMD Vladimir Jurowski starts the new concert season with enchantingly beautiful music from such times of confusion – with music full of longing and desire, evoking the memory of better days and hope for happier ones. Yves Savary, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester’s principal cellist, interprets Dmitri D. Shostakovich’s second cello concerto, which according to his biographer, Krzysztof Meyer, is, “perhaps the best of all his instrumental concertos”, in which we find every characteristic of Shostakovitch’s symphonic style: “The broad cantabile, the vast formal arcs, the vitality and motorics as well as the humour and grotesquerie.” Hans Zender, the so subtle and far-sighted composer, virtually invented a new genre in his late work – “the composed interpretation”. With his own compositional means he quotes, overwrites, counterpoints and vaults over Robert Schumann’s Fantasie für Klavier solo, expanded by a prelude and two interludes into a genuine orchestral piece, via which Schumann’s original, here with the “Ruinen”, “Triumphbogen” and “Sternennacht” movements, shines through and blossoms time and again – a magical sound experience across and beyond the ages.

Modest P. Mussorgsky
Prelude to his opera, Khovanshchina (arr.  Dmitri D. Shostakovich)

Dmitri D. Shostakovich
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra No. 2 in G major, Op. 126

Hans Zender
Schumann-Phantasie