Easter Festival Baden-Baden

Ludwig van Beethoven gave the piano concerto a new, symphonic status. With his Third, he freed it from the forms of his predecessors and teachers Mozart and Haydn. The famous dialogue between the piano and timpani is not the only way that it is revolutionary. No less novel to audiences in 1884 was Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, which is today considered one of the great masterpieces of its genre. Arthur Nikisch helped launch its success. The Hungarian conductor was appointed chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1895 and in 1913 made the first continuous sound recording of a symphony with the orchestra. The evening’s soloist, Jan Lisiecki, most recently thrilled audiences at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden in January 2023.

In 1905, Richard Strauss helped Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto achieve a success in Berlin that had not been matched at the premiere in Finland. Sibelius had meanwhile turned his back on Helsinki and revised the Concerto, with the beauty and solitude of his new home on a lake before his eyes. Lisa Batiashvili presents her interpretation of this work so close to the heart of the composer, who himself dreamed of being a violin virtuoso. Kirill Petrenko and the Berliner Philharmoniker will go on to interpret Johannes Brahms’s Fourth, which was first performed in Meiningen under Brahms’s direction. Hans von Bülow, like Brahms a frequent summer guest in Baden-Baden, had championed the work.