Pablo Heras-Casado / Anna Vinnitskaya

Following his successful debut with our orchestra in Bayreuth, Pablo Heras-Casado can now be heard for the first time in Bamberg. The programme features John Adams’ »Short Ride in a Fast Machine« from 1986, an energetic, percussively pulsating work that is ideal for a wild chase. Adams explained that he wanted to create a feeling »as if someone were to take you for a ride in a fantastic sports car, and by the end you wish you’d never gotten in« . However, we are happy to hop aboard this fast-paced musical vehicle – and then hop off again to perform the next piece together with Anna Vinnitskaya: a piano concerto premiered in 1932, in which she moves just one hand across the black and white keys. Maurice Ravel composed it on commission from the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had suffered an injury in the First World War and subsequently wrote music history with just one arm. Many composers dedicated a work for the left hand to him – and Ravel’s is studded with numerous stylistic deviations: It was once described as »tragic impetuosity« and concludes with a finale full of bubbling jazz acrobatics. As a young artist in 1888, Gustav Mahler left an astonishing first calling card in this genre with his symphony, which opens almost identically to Beethoven’s Fourth – a composer who was a great role model for him. The piece, titled »Titan« after Jean Paul’s novel, is an autobiography in sound, composed in just a few weeks. A letter reveals the emotional turmoil of the composer, who was working feverishly at the time, and the tempestuous, urgent nature of the music: Mahler speaks of a »whirlwind of life«.