CANCELLED: Staatskapelle Berlin / Daniel Barenboim

»Daniel Barenboim enjoys monument status in the world of classical music«, BR-Klassik wrote just recently after his appearance at the Salzburg Festival. So it goes without saying that the legendary pianist and conductor is turning his attention to a composer who represents perhaps the greatest monument in all of music history: Ludwig van Beethoven. The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth is being celebrated around the world this year, and hardly any other interpreter has explored his work so intensely and for so many years as Barenboim.

On the programme of the double concert is Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, better-known as the »Pastoral«, in which the composer put his much-loved strolls in the Viennese countryside into music. »The yellowhammers and quails, the nightingales and cuckoos around me had a hand in the composition«, he is supposed to have said. But before Barenboim and his musicians set these birds free in the Grand Hall, we hear the last of the overtures that Beethoven wrote for his sole opera.