Easter Festival Baden-Baden
Berliner Philharmoniker
A FORETASTE OF GRAND EVENTS TO COME
Ten years of the Easter Festival with the Berliner Philharmoniker! If you’re also lucky enough to stage opera with Kirill Petrenko, it makes sense to think big. With operas featuring plenty of stars, more chamber concerts, and varied symphonic programs for music lovers from all over the world. As befitting the occasion, we aim to celebrate the fin de siècle with its sumptuous excesses, its monumental ambitions, its desire to take on the whole world. And also its courage to set out into unknown realms. And so, from Baden-Baden and Berlin, we looked back to Vienna, to the years after 1900, to Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg – in order to build a new, longer bridge from Strauss to Handel, from the art nouveau fairy tale to the Baroque allegory. Both fairy tales and allegories seek to view the world through images, and this is also the aim of the extensive supporting program, which reveals interconnections, but also leaves the other-worldly in its foreignness. Art dazzles. And people shine when they marvel, when they celebrate and learn something new.
The Program
SA 1.4.23/WE 5.4.23/SU 9.4.23
STRAUSS: DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN
Monumental opera. When painter Gustav Klimt coated his famous paintings with gold leaf, Richard Strauss musically reveled in the opulence that was so typical of Vienna at the time. No fewer than five powerful Wagnerian voices are needed for his Die Frau ohne Schatten, not to mention the many supporting roles.
SU 2.4.23
BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER I
Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony enjoys cult status, not only because Visconti appropriated the Adagietto for his film Death in Venice. Mahler's massive symphonies delighted in overwhelming audiences with their magnificence, before the expressionist Arnold Schoenberg discovered a new musical star a few years later.
MO 3.4.23
BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER II
Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony enjoys cult status, not only because Visconti appropriated the Adagietto for his film Death in Venice. Mahler's massive symphonies delighted in overwhelming audiences with their magnificence, before the expressionist Arnold Schoenberg discovered a new musical star a few years later.
FR 7.4.23/MO 10.4.23
BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER III
Strauss's Last Songs call for a “deluxe” soprano, who in “Spring” soars up from warm depths to brilliant heights as she vies with the solo violin and horn. Diana Damrau, a regular guest at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, once appeared here as Sophie from Der Rosenkavalier, when, we quote, she offered up “pure Straussian bliss.”
SA 8.4.23
BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER
We can look forward to a lusciously sensuous oratorio with Handel's Il trionfo, in an informed and delectable performance by a vocal ensemble and the Berliner Philharmoniker. The orchestra not only brings together its members from all over the world, but has long since become a stylistic polyglot as well – thanks to specialist conductors like Emmanuelle Haïm, who has has joined the Berliners in infusing the old masterworks with new life for decades.
