1. Symphony Concert

Robert Schumann Concert piece for four horns and orchestra in F major Op. 86
Toshio Hosokawa Erdbeben. Träume, Suite
Pjotr I. Tschaikowsky Symphony No. 4 in F minor Op. 36

In no other music do the horns blare so joyfully and magnificently as in Robert Schumann’s Concert Piece in F major. Born in Zwickau, Schumann composed the work in Dresden in 1849, at the time a center of the German revolutionary movement. As Schumann noted, the political turmoil sparked his creative powers, as the jubilant sounds of his concert piece testify. A highlight of Sylvain Cambreling’s work as General Music Director of the Stuttgart State Opera from 2012 to 2018 was the world premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Erdbeben. Träume. From this work, the Japanese composer has put together an orchestral suite in which he reminds us of the extent to which (natural) disasters demand humility from life on our planet. Human destiny is at the very heart of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. The Russian Romantic composer considered “the whole of life“ to be “an incessant alternation of harsh reality with fleeting dreams of happiness“. And this is exactly what he turned into music with his Fourth, unleashing powerful storms of life as well as conjuring up islands of idyll.