Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin

The inaugural concert arouses expectations. Vladimir Jurowski and the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin are already acquainted through joint projects. But during the Musikfest, the 45-year-old will step up to the conductor’s stand for the first time as the chief conductor and artistic director of the orchestra. His credo is that “music makes demands”. The first part establishes what Boris Schwartz called the “signature of the 20th century”: the drama of escape, exile, and the question of art’s position; the emphasis of new beginnings in Beethoven’s most famous “public address to the human race” (Adorno) brings the concert to a close. International protests ensured that Isang Yun was liberated after his kidnapping and imprisonment by the South Korean secret service. He chose Berlin as his base to work. A Taoist world view forms the programme of “Dimensions”, in which Yun wanted to incorporate “the principle of ‘mobility in immobility’”, the living, individual microcosm within the constant, universal macrocosm” (H. Kunz). Arnold Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, a response to the last work of his pupil, Alban Berg, was his first great composition in American exile. For his oratorio “Julius Fučik”, of which he completed only the first part, Luigi Nono drew on texts by the eponymous Czech resistance fighter, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1943. His “Notes from the Gallows” were considered to be required anti-fascist reading. Excerpts from them are recited in the music. Nono pursued this theme and the writer far in the 1960s.