20:00 Philharmonie Berlin

Vladimir Jurowski & Christian Tetzlaff

Artist-in-Residence Concert 1

Anna Korsun

“Terricone” for symphony orchestra

Alban Berg

Concerto for violin and orchestra

Johannes Brahms

Symphony No. 2 in D major, op. 73

Vladimir Jurowski

Conductor

Christian Tetzlaff

Violin

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin

Moving Mountains

It makes sense that the percussionists have to work hard in Anna Korsun’s 15-minute work “Terricone” (2022). The term “terricones” refers to those landscape-altering, man-made heaps of dead rock, often inaccessible for long periods of time, that remain after the mining of ores, salts, or coal. These mountains of solid waste can also occur in landfills of garbage. Anna Korsun, a singer, pianist, organist, conductor, and composer born in Ukraine in 1986, has undertaken the task of translating this into music for symphony orchestra. Her spectacular works experiment with noise-orientedorchestral colours and unusual sonic techniques, sometimes incorporating the human voice.
Alban Berg began composing his deeply moving violin concerto immediately after the death of Manon Gropius. The 19-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius had died of polio on April 22, 1935. Berg dedicated the work “To the memory of an angel.” In August 1935, he completed the score at his summer house on Lake Wörthersee—on the opposite shore, Johannes Brahms had composed his violin concerto in 1878. Alban Berg himself died in December 1935, so that the violin concerto became not only his compositional legacy, but also his own requiem.
“…if I let you hear a symphony in winter, it should sound so cheerful and lovely that you believe I wrote it especially for you or even your young wife! That’s no feat, you might say, Brahms is clever, Lake Wörth is unspoiled territory, the melodies fly around so much that you have to be careful not to step on any.” What Johannes Brahms is raving about to Eduard Hanslick here concerns Symphony No. 2. It was written in 1877 in the same summer house as the violin concerto the following year. Compared to his first symphony, this time everything flowed very quickly: four months of composition compared to fourteen years, D major instead of C minor – a flyweight, a light-hearted encore to his first symphony.

Concert broadcast: Radio 3 will broadcast the concert live from 8:03 p.m.

Concert with