NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra / Kirill Gerstein / Omer Meir Wellber

As an introduction to the programme, Wellber has chosen a work that was originally conceived as incidental music for a play: Gabriel Fauré’s »Pelléas et Mélisande«. Shortly after composing it, Fauré revised his opulent music for Maeterlinck’s Symbolist fairy-tale to create an independent orchestral work. The suite featuring the famous »Sicilienne« is followed by Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, which »was written in the spirit of Mozart’s and Saint-Saënsʼs concertos,« as the composer himself emphasised. That, however, does not mean that Ravel neglected his own tonal language – he opens the concerto with a spirited lash of the whip and Spanish sounds. Jazz harmonies and rhythms then increasingly come to the foreground. The soloist tasked with performing this virtuosic score is the American pianist Kirill Gerstein – a popular guest with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra for many years now.

The concert comes to a close with Franz Schubert’s Third Symphony. Schubert composed the masterpiece in just a few days when he was only 18 years old. With that level of productivity, it is no surprise that the composer, despite his early death at the age of 31, still managed to leave behind an impressive oeuvre. The theatre critic Eduard Hanslick described Schubert’s Symphony No. 3 as »a work of youth and of youth’s gleefully raucous zeal «.