Klaus Mäkelä & Frank Peter Zimmermann

Programme

Béla Bartók
Rhapsody for violin and orchestra No. 2, Sz 90

Bohuslav Martinů
Suite concertante for Violin and Orchestra

Interval

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 4

Klaus Mäkelä, Conductor

Frank Peter Zimmermann, Violin

Anna Lucia Richter, Mezzo-Soprano

Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks

about the programme

A programme with three works requiring solo singers is certainly something special – so that Frank Peter Zimmermann has brought along two pieces never heard before in the concerts of the BRSO: Bartók’s roughly ten-minute Rhapsody No. 2 for violin and orchestra (1928) and Martinů’s Suite concertante (1944), a four-movement violin concerto in everything but name. Both works thrive on the tension between original eastern European folk melodies, modern sonic garb and the unique individual styles of their respective creators. A folk inflection of a quite different kind depicts the “heavenly joys” that soprano Anna Lucia Richter invokes in the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. But the childlike naivety of this idyll openly displays its fractures, and perhaps no Mahler symphony is as enigmatic as his purportedly “simple” Fourth. Standing at the rostrum is the young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, now in his second appearance with the BRSO following his début of February 2020.