symphony concert02

Leonidas Kavakos has already navigated the cosmos of Johannes Brahms as a world-renowned violinist over the last few years; he is now devoting himself as well to Johannes Brahms’s symphonic oeuvre as a conductor. In choosing the Fourth Symphony, he has programmed a work considered the pinnacle of symphonic works in the Western world, a composition about which a confidante of Brahms once said: »One never becomes weary of listening to, of gazing upon the wealth of ingenious qualities, unheard-of illuminations of a rhythmic, harmonic and tonal nature.« In his Fourth, Brahms bundled the achievements of the tradition as if in a concave mirror, with a certain detachment yet full of energy. At the same time, the Fourth so naturally creates a world all to itself from the smallest motivic material that it must have seemed incredibly modern to contemporaries as well as ensuing generations. In the first part of the concert, Kavakos juxtaposes the Hanseatic classicist with Mozart of the Viennese classical period. Kavakos has chosen Mozart's Third Violin Concerto to open the concert, about which the Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein once wrote: »Nothing is more miraculous in Mozart’s work than the appearance of this Concerto at this stage in his development.«