Gala concert at the opening of the season

Cosima Wagner suggested to her friend Richard Strauss that he read »Don Quixote«: »I believe you will find exquisite entertainment and distraction therein!« Strauss even found in his reading the model for a new piece about the fantastic adventures of the self-styled knight Don Quixote de la Mancha with his squire Sancho Panza. The up-and-coming cellist Edgar Moreau will fight windmill sails in this Sinfonia concertante; the Gürzenich Orchestra’s principal violist Nathan Braude seconds in the imaginary battles on viola. Ironically, the third movement entitled »Dream« was missing when the orchestral score of the »Première Suite d’Orchestre« by young Claude Debussy, which had been believed lost, was rediscovered in a New York library in 2006. Philippe Manoury, Composer for Cologne, has created a new »atmospheric and suggestive« dream for orchestra on the basis of a piano version of the piece, thereby composing the movement that perhaps sounds most like Debussy. Robert Schumann’s 3rd Symphony, the »Rhenish«, has something dreamlike. The symphony he composed last was written in just one month, shortly after his move from Dresden to Düsseldorf. The »Rhenish« conveys all the joy and optimism that Robert Schumann associated with the Rhineland: the dream of a happier time. This was also helped by the first sight of the Cologne Cathedral in July 1850, which served as a source of inspiration for the striking trombone chorale – though the building was only completed 30 years later.