Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin I

Britten dedicated his opera Peter Grimes to the “perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea”. Prior to the opera’s premiere, he compiled four of the orchestral preludes and interludes to form the Sea Interludes – a sequence of exceptionally vivid miniature tone poems evoking images of the English North Sea coast with its dramatic steep cliffs, picturesque fishing villages and raging storms. Gustav Mahler composed a storm in the soul in the famous Adagio from his 10th Symphony after having learned of the affair between his wife Alma and Walter Gropius: the music is intensely focused on the catastrophe with a glaringly dissonant nine-note chord ominously building up following the shrill sustained A on the violins (A for Alma!). This highly eloquent music was used by the British film director Ken Russell in his Mahler film from 1974 in the scene in which the famous composer’s hut bursts into flames. Shimmering string textures, iridescent wind passages and microtonal glissandos also characterise the atmospheric orchestral piece Sappho/ Bioluminescence by Liza Lim. The bipartite title references the fragmentarily surviving mysterious and timeless lyrical poetry of the Ancient Greek poetess blended with the image of an internally physical luminescence. Finally, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 takes us back to the time of the Napoleonic Wars, unmistakeably revealing the composer’s patriotic (and subsequently anti-Napoleonic) stance. In English-speaking countries, the work is also known as “The Emperor” which prompted the musicologist Harry Goldschmidt to suggest a more apt title: “The Anti-Emperor”.