Of course Chopin is in demand, normally, but here we expect our curious audience to attend 4 concerts. And four soloists who are not supposed to be in competition, but should playfully wrestle different colors from the composer. They are young pianists at the beginning of their careers, but despite their youth, established 'winners' are among them. Perhaps this marathon is suitable for dealing very intensively with just one composer. That would be nice. Personally, I underestimated Chopin for a long time, felt him to be a superficial salon lion courting the favor of the audience. Then there was a rainy summer and a fat cassette with Claudio Arrau and Chopin. And then I became aware of what kind of cosmos one can dive into, how diverse the emotional states are, how fine this music is. Take a journey with Chopin!

This Chopin gala is framed by two great symphony concerts. In the first with our Russian friend Uryupin at the podium, we discover a very rarely played symphony by Sibelius. The actual 'time calculation' in Sibelius begins with the Second, but how to understand the Second if one doesn't know where it comes from? How can we even understand our present, halfway, if we know what the past looked like, what our present reacts to: sometimes well, sometimes less well. Besides the up-and-coming conductor, we experience a prize-winning soloist; here too an announcing motto: we also want to experience and discover the great artists of tomorrow in the symphonic as well as instrumental field. I don't particularly like the word 'star'. – And then on Sunday the monumental orchestral work 'Pelleas and Melisande' by Arnold Schönberg, the splendid detachment from the past, a bow to late romanticism and the announcement of a new era. And songs by Schönberg like Marx: two antipodes, because Marx only reluctantly wanted to detach himself from the old times and felt misunderstood. The excerpts from 'Capriccio' show the master composer; unique how with the reduction of means another cosmos is opened up. Lothar Koenigs is established and I'm glad he's coming to us. So it's starting, winter is also announcing itself and in a few weeks the summer '20 will be revealed at a press conference: a rich program that we all look forward to.

Yours, Bernd Loebe
Artistic Managing Director