Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Philharmonie Hall, Berlin

Germany

GIDON KREMER violin

SÄCHSISCHE STAATSKAPELLE DRESDEN
CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN conductor

Composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who was born in 1931, once wrote that “as an ideal, I regard a kind of relationship to tradition and to new compositional means in which the artist masters all the means – both the new ones and the traditional ones – but in such a way as if he were not paying attention to either. There are composers who construct their works very consciously, but I am one of those who instead tend to ‘cultivate’ their works. And this is why the entire world as I perceive it forms more or less the roots of a tree, and the work which grows out of it represents the branches and the leaves. One can call them new, but they are nonetheless leaves, and from this point of view they are always traditional, old.”

This Sächsische Staatskapelle Berlin concert under Christian Thielemann will present Gubaidulina’s Second Violin Concert, which was composed in 2007 and is titled “In Tempus prasens”; the soloist is Gidon Kremer. Also on the programme is the Ninth Symphony by Anton Bruckner, a composer who also “cultivated” his works – even if for entirely different reasons than Gubaidulina. The lack of understanding that Bruckner’s symphonies were met with – Eduard Hanslick once chastised them as “gigantic snakes” – led to the composer revising many of his works multiple times. Unfinished at the time of Bruckner’s death in 1896, the Ninth was time and again interrupted by work on new versions of the composer’s First, Third and Eighth Symphonies.

Sofia Gubaidulina : In Tempus praesens Concerto for violin and orchestra
Anton Bruckner : Symphony No. 9