Name: Simon Rattle conducts a Beethoven evening in Taipei
Start: 2016-05-07T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2016-05-07T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Berliner Philharmonie

Organization

Conductor

Simon Rattle

Singer

Tenor

Christian Elsner

Bass

Dimitry Ivashchenko

Soprano

Iwona Sobotka

Orchestra

Berliner Philharmoniker

Simon Rattle conducts a Beethoven evening in Taipei

Berlin

Germany

Berliner Philharmonie

A particularly warm relationship has developed between the Taiwanese audience and the Berliner Philharmoniker since their first guest appearance in 2005. For this guest performance at the Taipei National Concert Hall in May 2015, the orchestra and its chief conductor Sir Simon Rattle present Beethoven’s First and Ninth Symphony – effectively a highly concentrated substratum of the celebrated Beethoven cycle that shaped the Philharmoniker’s entire 2015/2016 season.

Simon Rattle conducts a Beethoven evening in Taipei: 9. Sinfonie in d-Moll op. 125 Beethoven

Public

9th Symphony

Approved

The Berliner Philharmoniker have friends all over the world. A particularly close relationship has evolved over the years with Taiwanese audiences. With this concert, the orchestra and its chief conductor Sir Simon Rattle made their fourth guest appearance in Taipei. This time, they performed a part of their most important project of the 2015/2016 season which was dedicated to the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. Following on from successful performances of the complete cycle in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and New York, this concert with the first and the last symphony presents to a certain extent a highly concentrated substratum. An additional emotional touch to the concert in the National Concert Hall of Taipei is added by the participation of the Taiwan National Chorus in Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

The concert offers an exciting journey from Beethoven’s first symphonic work to his testament to the genre. Significantly, the First Symphony was first performed in 1800, exactly at the beginning of the new century and is, also programmatically, in C major, a key without accidentals. However, Beethoven only finds his way to this after a series of harmonic surprises in a slow introduction which is unconventional in every way. You can already admire in the work of the 30-year-old composer the consummate command of orchestration and the art of building a complex motivic system from simple blocks. Almost a quarter of a century later, Beethoven completed his last symphony. The finale is a revolutionary act in the history of the genre, not only through the use of voices, but also in the recurrence of themes from all previous movements. And the number nine was subsequently to become the magical barrier for the successive symphonists Bruckner, Dvořák and Mahler.

English

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

Ensemble