In 2023, one of the masters of modern music would have turned 100 years old. György Ligeti helped to open up completely new musical landscapes with his works from the 1960s onwards, and his status as an absolute icon and as an innovator in the history of music is completely indisputable. Ramifications are for string players who almost sound like a single string instrument. The work is an eight-minute maggi-cube of string sound that you never thought the old instruments could sound like. After the celebration of Ligeti's 100 years, two works of older date follow. First, a Haydn symphony with the nickname "The Hen", which is a charming symphony that did not get its nickname from Haydn himself, but because someone later thought that one of the themes in the first movement sounds like chickens walking and clucking and twitching head back and forth.
After the break comes Schubert's great Symphony No. 9. A work that Schubert never heard performed by a professional orchestra, but the slightly younger composer Robert Schumann got hold of the manuscript in 1838 – 10 years after Schubert's death – and arranged for the symphony to be performed with a completely third composer, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, as conductor. Even after his death, the work was rarely performed because the orchestras of the time judged it unnecessarily difficult to play, and so the four movements together last about an hour. Fortunately, we are better used to orchestras today, so Schubert's thoroughly beautiful and grandiose 9th Symphony sounds in all concert halls around the world.
You can read what Katrine Nordland wrote about Schubert's 9th Symphony, the last time we played the work, here:
As is well known, Schubert's life (1797-1828) was even shorter than Mozart's - and unlike his great predecessor, Schubert only achieved more widespread recognition in his very last years. Before then, an uncanny amount of his music was simply allowed to fall through the cracks (unpublished works flourished freely among Schubert's friends and colleagues, who often forgot to return the manuscripts to Schubert, and the original score for the adventure opera Des Teufels Lustschloss was e.g. used as kindling fuel by a friend's host). Vienna's Gesellschaft für Musikfreunde, to which Schubert belonged, probably had the best intentions of performing the C major symphony while the composer was still alive, and had also paid the composer a modest fee for the work, but abandoned plans after a few performances , because it was considered too difficult. And it was therefore not until more than a decade after the composer's death that tonight's symphony was first performed. One of the standard-bearers for the dissemination of Schubert's genius beyond his established reputation as a naïvely sweet songwriter, Robert Schumann, traveled to Vienna in 1838 to ascertain for himself how many unpublished Schubert manuscripts were still in the possession of Schubert's brother Ferdinand. He took a copy of the score for the 9th Symphony back to Leipzig with him,
"He who does not know this symphony still knows little about Schubert", declared Schumann. At the end of the evening, we can look forward to having become even more knowledgeable about the composer Schubert.
