Kyiv Symphony Orchestra

After a celebrated performance last year, the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, since 2023 under the official patronage of the Berliner Philharmoniker, is once again a guest at the Philharmonie Berlin. The orchestra from Kiev performs in the most important European concert halls and, with its principal conductor Luigi Gaggero, was recently awarded the prestigious prize of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. For their guest performance at the Philharmonie Berlin, the Ukrainian ensemble has chosen the Fifth Symphony by Mychajlo Werbyzkyj, who is best known in his homeland as the composer of the Ukrainian national anthem: In 1865, his setting of the poem “Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy” – Ukraine has not yet died – by the Ukrainian ethnographer Pavlo Chubynskyj, who was banished to the northern Russian port city of Arkhangelsk for seven years because of “harmful influence”, was published three years earlier. Werbyzkyj's symphony, which ends with a lively “Kolomejka” - a whirling circle dance cultivated by the Carpatho-Ukrainian mountain people of the Hutsuls - is followed by Robert Schumann’s symphonic Cello Concerto, whose “euphony and deep feeling” already delighted Clara Schumann. The soloist is Ludwig Quandt, first solo cellist of the Berliner Philharmoniker. The last piece on the programme is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which was unmistakably influenced by the idioms of French revolutionary music and leads from “darkness to light” in a visionary dramaturgy.