Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra

The third Philharmonic Concert takes audiences on a tour of modern music and concert history: Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, György Ligeti and a work by contemporary composer Jörg Widmann are all on the music stands of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra under the baton of Kent Nagano. The centrepiece, however, is Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony: human destiny as a personal path supplied the composer with the inspiration for his Fifth Symphony, and again for the Sixth, which was written at roughly the same time. This way of thinking was revolutionary at the time, and anticipated the romanticism of the Enlightenment: Beethoven no longer saw nature as divinely ordained, but as a force individually determined by humanity. Thus tonight’s concert offers a musical scenario of the world and nature, of dreams and reality.