DEAR CONCERT LOVERS!

All hell has broken loose in our "Museum"! We celebrate a witches sabbath, experience the horrors of the Last Judgement, a flight from reality, the end of the world and visit Juliet’s grave and the roman catacombs. In other words this new season is about life and death. Two epochal, monumental choral works, Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa di Requiem and The Book of the Seven Seals by Franz Schmidt, ask the question about »final things«, about God and the world: the existential question. Who knows the answer – music?
This season we also want to bring the composers themselves into a conversation with one another: Richard Strauss tells his »Heldenleben«, Hector Berlioz describes an »Episode from the Life of an Artist« (the original title of his Symphonie fantastique); Beethoven sends greetings from the country, Mendelssohn writes from Scotland – and Dvorak from the New World! A journey around the world, well the world of music at least, with Strauß, Bruckner, Ravel and Sibelius, Brahms and Gershwin, with classics, rarities and new discoveries. Have you already heard Rachmaninov’s fifth piano concerto?
I look forward very much to a wonderful season with excellent soloists, including Daniel Barenboim, who will play both piano concertos in 2011, the Liszt year. I welcome incredible conductors and highly respected colleagues to the podium of the Opern- und Museumsorchesters – including the winner of the 2010 Sir Georg Solti Competition! Above all I look forward to you, our audiences, and many shared experiences because music, like all philanthropy, lives from giving and taking, from communication and passing the word on. I hope we shall see each other – in the Alte Oper - at our Museums concerts!
Warmly, your
Sebastian Weigle

Introductory talks by Paul Bartholomäi: Sundays at 10:15 h, Mondays at18:30 h (in the Mozart Saal or Hindemith Foyer in the Alte Oper)