Gegenwelt

»Veiled symphonies«, this is the term that Robert Schumann used to describe the piano sonatas by the young Johannes Brahms. These words portray the composer from Hamburg as someone who, even being a generation younger, already frequently crossed the borders between forms. It took Brahms 14 years and many internal battles to finally produce his first symphony; a phase of hesitation, dismissal and search. His driving force, his unattainable ideal, and also reason for questioning his own abilities was the symphonic oeuvre by Beethoven. Once the First Symphony was finally born, the contemporary critics were divided. To us, the work reveals dark glowing colours, melancholy, restless agitation – the borderline between self-doubt and urgent expression, the encounter of nature and divinity in the last movement. Quiet nostalgia and melancholy also characterize Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto. Wearing a smile of wisdom, the piece evokes the feelings of an idyllic golden autumn, diverting the attention from the time it was written. For at the time Strauss created this brilliant touchstone for oboists in 1945, the world around him lay in ruins. François Leleux enters a world between day and dream and celebrates the infinite melismata of the solo part. Opening the concert, the Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena unleashes the ecstatic, surging sounds of the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera.