Easter Festival Baden-Baden

When Clara and Robert Schumann were fighting for their future together, they found solace in an operatic couple: Florestan and Leonore from Fidelio. Now Joana Mallwitz and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra are opening the 2027 Easter Festival with this masterpiece. Beethoven's truly thrilling, symphonic opera music celebrates heroes who combine their wish for personal happiness with their desire for freedom. And differently than usual, a heroine saves her hero: in our performance, she is Vera-Lotte Boecker, Singer of the Year 2022 in the Opernwelt magazine critics' survey. Florestan will be sung by tenor Sean Panikkar, who is exceptionally popular in America. Krzysztof Warlikowski, the director of the production, has already been awarded the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale for his life's work.

Beethoven's Missa solemnis is less a liturgical work than a spiritual experience. The composer himself called it his "greatest composition" – a companion piece to the Ninth Symphony in D minor that shines radiantly in D major. The "Dona nobis pacem," "Give us your peace," leaves no one untouched. This piece is a statement – and a calling card for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and its chief conductor Klaus Mäkelä.

"In the valley spring blooms forth!" With this motto of Schumann's symphony, we can even sing along! The trumpet fanfare that opens this exuberant work is followed by music full of vibrant elan. Schumann conceived a work of optimistic music which, along with spring, also welcomes a brighter future. His contemporary Berlioz, on the other hand, wanted in his symphony to retell his life story – and impress a woman. Both works are brilliant: two hits of the repertoire which are performed here together in the same concert.

It would be Beethoven’s most exuberant symphony—if it weren’t for the funeral march in the second movement! That movement has, in fact, become world-famous; you’ve surely heard it in movies and on TV. Otherwise, it’s all celebration: Richard Wagner described Beethoven’s symphony as an “apotheosis of dance.” And speaking of dances: Contemporaries of the Finnish composer called the finale of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto a “polonaise for polar bears”: Nordic, robust, Scandinavian like the entire work—yet so virtuosic that one of the most important violin competitions was named after Sibelius. This classical hit will be presented at the Festspielhaus by France’s star violinist Renaud Capuçon.

Mozart's most famous choral work meets a piece by Beethoven that is surprisingly rarely heard: the Choral Fantasy. A peculiar mixture of choral cantata, piano concerto, and piano fantasy – including an early foreshadowing of the "Ode to Joy." This melody usually elicits an involuntary smile from listeners. What a wonderful moment of recognition! No wonder the work is often called Beethoven's "little Ninth."

Sergei Prokofiev was himself a great pianist. Which is why his piano works are as virtuosic as they are enjoyable to play. Even the pieces from his ballet Romeo and Juliet sound almost better on the piano than with the orchestra. So it’s no wonder that great pianists love to program these miniatures – Seong-Jin Cho, who lives in Berlin, has been one of the most prominent among them for years. In his program, he combines Prokofiev with Mozart – and with a sonata by Jörg Widmann which, with its nickname "Sonata facile," clearly harks back to the Salzburg classic.

The National Youth Orchestra of Germany brings together two cult works of modernism: Arvo Pärt's Fratres, a meditative ritual that, like all of this composer’s music, immediately remains in our ear – and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, whose brimming tension culminates in a finale whose power ingeniously and ambiguously alternates between adaptation and hidden criticism. Two impressive works that bring the 2027 Easter Festival to a perfect conclusion.