Jan Mráček plays Stravinsky

“Coincidence is itself merely the collision of the creative impulses.” (Friedrich Nietzsche) This concert presents a sound sculpture premiered in 1963 that plays with coincidence and seeks to exhaust the possibilities offered by mechanics. Ligeti’s "Poème symphonique" is a fascinating musical experiment: on stage are 100 metronomes, which are set in motion by some musicians. The metronomes tick away valiantly, all higgledy-piggledy at first, but then more and more of them lose their momentum and fall silent, until in the end only the most persistent metronome remains. Stravinsky, a musical revolutionary like Ligeti, once said of his creative ideas: "You take up a tradition to make something new." For his 1931 Violin Concerto, he drew on the baroque era – but defiantly spiced his music with whimsical ingredients from 20th-century light music. We look forward to welcoming Czech violinist Jan Mráček to the stage as our soloist in this exciting work. Mráček was the youngest prize winner of the "Prague Spring" competition in 2010 and since then has carved out a remarkable career. To bring our programme to a close, our orchestra will play a work that critic Eduard Hanslick found to contain an extraordinary "energy of genuine symphonic invention”. Brahms had completed his last symphony during his summer vacation of 1885. Even before its premiere in Meiningen, which the composer himself conducted, the work triggered associations with the cosmos in Brahms’ friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg: "The deeper I look into it, the more stars appear, the more individual joys I have, both expected and surprising, and the clearer becomes the consistent character that makes a unity of this multiplicity”.