Over the past few decades Esa-Pekka Salonen
has managed to balance an international conducting career with his
increasingly-prominent activities as a composer. For his recent appearance at
Musikfest Berlin, he led the Orchestre de Paris through a programme that paired
works by Berio and Sibelius with the German première of his own Horn
Concerto, written for and performed on this evening by Stefan Dohr. If the
first half of the programme was driven by the thrill of hearing a new work for
the first time, the second offered the familiar pleasures of hearing one of
Sibelius’ finest scores directed by one of his most devoted twenty-first
century interpreters.
The evening opened with Requies, a
brief but highly focussed work written by Luciano Berio in memory of his
frequent collaborator (and ex-wife) Cathy Berberian, the vocal whirlwind…
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