Programme
Performers
Information about the programme
This programme is unusually diverse even for the musicians of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Yet the musical worlds of Ligeti, Wagner, and Webern, which merge more or less seamlessly in this concert, are not as far apart as one might think. And in the second half there is Bruckner’s auratic Ninth Symphony, a true monolith. “It seems that the Ninth is a limit. If one wishes to go beyond it, one must leave this world. Those who wrote a Ninth were already too close to the hereafter” – this was Schönberg’s prophetic statement regarding Mahler, who died without ever having heard his Ninth Symphony. Bruckner is also said to have been afraid of this fatal number: “I don’t want to start on my Ninth at all, I don’t dare.” He died while working on the fourth movement.