Guest At Herbstgold-festival

For our guest performance in Eisenstadt, Julian Rachlin will be taking on the double role as soloist and conductor – a common practice in Mozart's lifetime. He composed many of his works as brilliant showcases for himself. In 1777, for example, he wrote to his father that he had successfully performed his Violin Concerto in G major ‘at a soupée’ in Augsburg, a work whose moving course features a few melodies that were popular at the time. Just as we do today as orchestras, Mozart was constantly travelling all over Europe and often refined his musical creations while on the road: The C major Symphony was composed in 1783 ‘at the drop of a hat’ for a spontaneous concert in Linz, Upper Austria. For the first time, we hear a slow Mozart introduction here – about which the musicologist Alfred Einstein remarked that it leads ‘from the sweetest yearning to the depths of sinister agitation’. Apart from that, it also happens to be a lively and somewhat whimsical work. To conclude, we will play Schumann's Fourth Symphony, which he sketched in 1841 during a happy period following his marriage to his beloved Clara: a highly romantic piece – about which his fellow composer Tchaikovsky remarked 30 years later: “Schumann’s music, which organically builds on Beethoven’s work whilst at the same time decisively breaking away from it, opens up a whole world of new musical forms to us, strumming strings that his great predecessors had not yet touched. In it we find the echo of mysterious processes of our inner life, those doubts, depressions and aspirations to the ideal that move contemporary hearts.”