Viennese School
2nd Hansa I subscription concert
Works by Beethoven, Schönberg and Mozart
»In 150 years, my music will be just as comprehensible as Mozart’s is today«, predicted Schönberg. In 2024, the music world will be celebrating the 150th birthday of this composer who never achieved the popularity of Mozart, but whose influence still casts a spell today. The composition of his 2nd Chamber Symphony took more than 30 years: begun in 1906 and taken up again and again, he finally completed two of the original three movements in exile in America after fleeing from the Nazis. Driven by a »longing for the older style« he presented a tonal composition in New York in 1940, which is not at all nostalgic but instead fascinates with its expressive gesture and varying triadic harmony. This »perfected corpus« of the Second Viennese School is embedded in compositions of the Viennese Classical period: Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, which still amazes listeners today with its pensive opening of the solo piano, and the Symphony in E flat major K. 543, one of the highlights of Mozart’s oeuvre.