Staatskapelle berlin / Daniel Barenboim / Mutter

ORIGINALLY PLANNED FOR JANUARY 19

Berlin State Chapel

Daniel Barenboim – Director

Anne-Sophie Mutter – Violin

The sovereign direction of Daniel Barenboim and the luminous bow of Anne-Sophie Mutter converge for this program celebrating the strings, in which one of the most beautiful pages of Pierre Boulez responds to two absolute summits of Beethovenian art.

Of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, it is probably enough to recall that Hoffmann considered it the very symbol of Romanticism, that Goethe, when the very young Mendelssohn played it for him on the piano, was afraid of seeing "his house collapse" and that Madame Malibran – according to Berlioz – was seized upon hearing it by a nervous attack so powerful that she had to be evacuated! Almost as emblematic, the Violin Concerto magnifies the solo instrument while preserving a very great density in the orchestra, whether in the hymnic breadth of the Allegro, the poetry of the Larghetto variations or the popular verve of the concluding Rondo. To perfect this homage to the strings, Pierre Boulez's Book for Strings (1968) deploys all the refinement of its sound textures and the complexity of its polyphony.