NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst

The programme opens with an often underestimated early symphony by one of Welser-Möst’s particularly favoured Viennese composers: Franz Schubert’s Third Symphony. Just 18 years old at the time, Schubert dashed off this masterpiece in only a few days – and from the optimistic clarinet melody of the first movement to the high-spirited, Rossini-like finale, the music seems almost entirely to tell of life’s sunny side. Accordingly, the demanding critic Eduard Hanslick later wrote that the Symphony in D major was »a work of youth and its cheerfully boisterous urge to act«.

Richard Strauss’s music from »Der Rosenkavalier« likewise radiates »that bright buoyancy of musical language« and »Apollonian serenity of melody« (Ernst Krause) otherwise associated with Viennese Classicism. No wonder: Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal conceived the opera in 1911 as a nostalgic homage to Vienna’s golden age. Here, lighthearted waltz rapture is just as indispensable as heart-rending melody and opulent orchestral luxury – above all in the famous trio, which also forms the emotional climax of the orchestral suite that Welser-Möst has assembled for the glittering finale of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra’s 2025/26 season. »One has to weep, because it’s so beautiful,« says one of the protagonists in Strauss’s opera – and she’s absolutely right!