Opening concert

Bach – Berg – Mendelssohn. This trio of composers and their music provide an original and unusual start to the festival in St. Thomas’ Church.

The programme centres on Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, composed in 1935 as a musical tribute to Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler-Werfel from her marriage with the architect and Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius. She died of polio in April 1935 at the age of just 18. Alban Berg wrote the work in two movements, the first of which paints a musical portrait of the young girl, while the second depicts her tragic death. With this concept, despite the use of modern tonal language and the twelve-tone technique Alban Berg followed the traditional principle of expressing non-musical content with purely instrumental music. In the concerto’s final movement, Berg reveals himself as an admirer of Bach: he quotes the closing chorale »Es ist genug« – »It is enough« – from the cantata »O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort« (»O eternity, you thunder-word!«, BWV 60), which Bach wrote in the autumn of 1723 for the 24th Sunday after Trinity. The Gospel reading for that day tells how Jesus brought a dead child back to life (Mt 9, 18–36). After some elaborate variations on Bach’s thrilling chorale movement, Berg’s concerto dies away in the highest register of the violin, and pianissimo, illustrating the peaceful spheres of the afterlife to which the »angel«, Manon, has gone.

A yearning for God is also evident in in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s psalm setting »Wie der Hirsch schreit nach frischem Wasser«, which was premiered in the Leipzig Gewandhaus on New Year’s Day, 1838. There is also any number of loans from the style of Johann Sebastian Bach in the lyrical choruses and arias of this work.

With the French violinist Chouchane Siranossian, this year’s Bachfest artist-in-residence, the Gewandhaus Orchestra is complemented by an outstanding soloist. In numerous concerts and recordings she has proved that she is as well-versed in Baroque music as in music of the Classical, Romantic and Modernist periods; listening to her is a truly moving experience. Adding to the charm of this concert is the contrast with the corresponding vocal works by Bach and Mendelssohn, which the Thomanerchor will perform together with the Gewandhaus Orchestra under the direction of Thomaskantor Andreas Reize.