Concerts for Hamburg

The NDR Radiophilharmonie and its chief conductor Andrew Manze are giving two guest concert performances in Hamburg. The Hanoverians have chosen Smetana’s »Moldau«, which is one of the most famous works in the classical repertoire – and rightly so, because no one painted more beautiful landscapes in music than the Czech composer. In its day, Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto was a real innovation: the piece was composed shortly after the valved trumpet was invented, which made it possible to produce far more notes than on the natural trumpets that preceded it. Haydn exploited the new instrument to the full, making it quaver elegantly and using all the whole range of the musical scale. The young star Simon Höfele is the soloist in this concerto. The concert then comes to a climactic close with Mozart’s »Prague Symphony«.