Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin

With his opera “Peter Grimes”, which premiered in 1945, Benjamin Britten dedicated a monument of unique beauty and dramatic intensity to the rough climes of the English coast and its inhabitants.

He himself wrote that by composing the work “it had concerned to me around the eternal fight of the men and women, who wrested its life, their living costs from the sea, expression to lend to my knowledge.” Britten made several of the suggestive orchestral descriptions of nature in “Peter Grimes” accessible in concert hall performances. Rimbaud’s “Les Illuminations”, which Britten set to music in 1939, shows another side of the composer, and will be performed in this concert by the Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin under Donald Runnicles with Klaus Florian Vogt as soloist.

Like Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich also borrowed from the wealth of traditional musical expressive forms in order to gain access to his own, by no means eclectic musical language. The Russian composer drew a surprising résumé of his relationship to the past in his final “Symphony No. 15”, which was premiered in 1972.