The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and its founder and long-time director Daniel Barenboim are connected by far more than artistic collaboration. Since 1999, the ensemble has stood for the idea of enabling dialogue through making music together – across cultural and political boundaries. Barenboim’s work with young musicians from the Middle East is understood not merely as an artistic project, but as a deeply lived conviction: sound as a space of encounter, precision as the prerequisite for truly listening to one another. From this commitment to dialogue emerges a concert programme that places musical extremes side by side.
Few symphonies begin as darkly and ominously as Franz Schubert’s »Unfinished« Symphony, in which mysterious soundscapes collide with blossoming Viennese waltz lyricism. A milestone of music history in miniature can be experienced in excerpts from the instrumental version of Richard Wagner’s »Tristan und Isolde«: an opera of unprecedented harmonic daring and transgressive power. Ludwig van Beethoven’s »Eroica«, meanwhile, was at the time an unheard-of symphony, heroic, technically demanding and of extraordinary length, composed during the Napoleonic Wars.
PERFORMERS
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra orchestra
Daniel Barenboim conductor
PROGRAM
Franz Schubert
Symphony No. 7 in B minor, D 759 »Unfinished«
Richard Wagner
Prelude and Liebestod from the opera »Tristan und Isolde«, WWV 90
- Interval -
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 »Eroica«
