Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra

The Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra starts the 2018/19 season with an exploration of classic genres in music history. It is often claimed that Joseph Haydn invented the symphony. He didn’t, but with 100 (surviving) symphonies to his name, he played a key part in establishing the genre as an integral element in classical music. Something similar can be said of Mozart’s piano concertos. Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach were the real innovators, but Mozart was the first composer to elevate the genre to true greatness. 120 years after Mozart, a composer came along and turned the classical music world on its head: Arnold Schönberg had at least as much influence on the course of music history as his famous predecessor. In 1906, immediately after completing his First Chamber Symphony, he began work on the second. He did not finish it until 1940, by which time he was living in exile in America. The work takes the form of a »completed torso« – music that looks forward into the future, while simultaneously looking back to the past.