Jonathan Nott, Bart Vandenbogaerde

We always look forward to the creative musings of our former principal conductor. As in the previous season, he once more focuses on the often underrated composer Zemlinsky, whose Bohemian roots also connect him to our orchestra, having served as music director at the New German Theatre in Prague from 1911 to 1927. Jonathan Nott has pieced together a programme that was performed in this exact combination during Zemlinsky’s lifetime: we're bringing back a concert that took place at Carnegie Hall in 1940 with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Dimitri Mitropoulos. The programme opens with the “Tragic Overture”, which Brahms wrote in 1880 and, reflecting his “melancholic disposition”, infused with gloomy passages. Our first concertmaster Bart Vandenbogaerde then appears as soloist in two charming character pieces: According to Chausson, his Poème from 1896 unfolds “in a very free form with some passages in which the violin plays alone” – and Saint-Saëns’s work from 1863 is also astounding violin acrobatics with catchy melodies and a folklore-based rhythm. Zemlinsky’s Sinfonietta was premiered in the United States at that New York concert, at a time when he was struggling with health problems in American exile. It is a masterfully orchestrated composition, rich in warm colours, but with a sense of foreboding, as suggested by the self-quotation from Maeterlinck's setting of “Wohin gehst du?” (“Where are you going?”). The programme for that concert concluded on an atmospheric note with the second suite from Casella”s opera La donna serpente, premiered in 1932, combining the fantastical world of fairy tales with the tradition of tongue-in-cheek mask play in a contrasting fashion.

Tickets from 25.08.2025 10 a.m.