Berliner Philharmoniker I

Peter Eötvös remembers: Georges Cziffra studied with Eötvös’s mother at the Music Academy in Budapest “so I had the chance to get to know him myself when I was still a child.” After an unsuccessful attempt to escape in the early 1950s, the Hungarian piano virtuoso was sentenced to forced labour, and it was not until 1956 that he could leave Hungary for Paris, where he embarked on a global career. To mark his 100th birthday, Peter Eötvös composed the piano concerto “Cziffra Psodia”, a rhapsodic piece of music that mirrors Cziffra’s dramatic life in sound: the metallic rhythm in the first movement, for example, is reminiscent of “the work in a quarry during his imprisonment. The later, meditative state of the moments of his withdrawal from the public life has been composed in three quiet cadenzas.” In the Berliner Philharmoniker’s concert conducted by Jonathan Nott, the solo part is taken by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, winner of the 2017 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. The evening opens with the music of Missy Mazzoli: the New York composer succeeds in finding new thematic and musical facets in the ancient material of the Orpheus saga – already the subject of the first opera in musical history, Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” – by focusing on the moment of loss, of loneliness rather than on the search. After the interval, the programme features a philosophical work in Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony, that starts with Lowell Mason’s hymn “Watchman, Tell us of the Night” with its “urgent question about what and why” (Ives) and Nathanael Hawthorne’s short sory “The Celestial Railroad”. The music consists of sound groups alternating internally that operate on different dynamic, spatial levels, with the whole piece being made up of Ives’s typical mixture of religious hymns, folk songs and patriotic songs.