17 December 2016
Side by Side | Wagner
Daniele Gatti, conductor
RCO meets London
United Kingdom
RCO meets Europe, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s tour of all the EU member states, continues at London’s Barbican Hall with Daniele Gatti. The orchestra is performing the prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg side by side with the young musicians of the National Youth Orchestra.
‘An unbroken line runs from Wagner to Mahler, Alban Berg and beyond,’ says Daniele Gatti. Less than thirty-five years after Wagner’s Götterdämmerung was premiered, the only completed movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 – the Adagio, a long-drawn-out, heartfelt cry – explored the boundary between nineteenth-century Romanticism and early twentieth-century despair.
Meanwhile, the composers of the Second Viennese School were already creating a new musical language. Alban Berg, the least radical among them, demonstrates just how closely akin his music is to that of Mahler in his Drei Orchesterstücke.