CANCELLED: Symphoniker Hamburg / Charles Dutoit

A conducting legend on the rostrum and a perfect start to the concert: Claude Debussy’s »Petite Suite« first saw the light of day in a version for piano duo, and was popular for the purpose of domestic music-making in bourgeois circles, with the composer himself taking part for the first time in 1889. There is no question about it: this is an entertaining work, light-hearted and with a spring in its step.

In the Sibelius Violin Concerto the solo part is taken by Guy Braunstein, former leader of the Berlin Philharmonic and long associated with the Symphoniker. No other Scandinavian composer suffered more from clichés ascribed to him than Jean Sibelius. With »Finlandia« he wrote the inofficial national anthem of his native Finland, and this proved his undoing. But in his Violin Concerto, written in the early years of the 20th century, we hear clearly that Sibelius was a European composer of immense importance for music history. The listener who hears only wide expanses, forests and melancholy in his music does him wrong.

The evening is brought to an end by a somewhat younger contemporary of Debussy’s and Sibelius’s. The triumphant success of his ballet »The Firebird« in 1910 made Igor Stravinsky famous overnight. His felicitous cooperation with Sergei Diaghilev, the influential impresario of the »Ballets russes«, was to be continued a year later with »Petrushka«. Stravinsky himself supplied the most apt description: »While working on this score I was dogged by the idea of a marionette that suddenly comes to life and so exhausts the orchestra’s patience with its devilish arpeggio leaps that the musicians threaten it with fanfares. The result is hubbub and confusion that end with the collapse, at once jocular and wretched, of the poor jumping jack.«