The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and its founder and long-standing director Daniel Barenboim have made history. Since 1999, the ensemble has stood for the idea that making music together can create a space for dialogue – across cultural and political boundaries. Barenboim’s work with young musicians from the Middle East is not only an artistic project, but a conviction put into practice: sound as a space for encounter, making music together as a basis for listening to one another.
For this concert, Barenboim has brought together some of his favourite composers. Enigmatic, dark soundscapes collide with the blissful exuberance of the waltz in Franz Schubert’s legendary »Unfinished« Symphony. A milestone in operatic history, Richard Wagner’s »Tristan und Isolde« expresses impossible love in a single yearning chord – a quality that remains irresistible in the symphonic excerpts. The programme concludes – in place of Beethoven’s »Eroica« – with Schumann’s beloved »Rhenish Symphony«, expressing his euphoria at taking up a new position in Düsseldorf and his sense of the majestic panorama of the Rhine.
PERFORMERS
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra orchestra
Daniel Barenboim conductor
PROGRAM
Franz Schubert
Symphony No. 7 in B minor, D 759 »Unfinished«
Richard Wagner
Prelude and Liebestod from the opera »Tristan und Isolde«, WWV 90
- Interval -
Robert Schumann
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 97 »Rhenish«
