Season Opening
Kirill Petrenko conducts Elgar and Tchaikovsky Season OpeningKirill Petrenko conducts Elgar and Tchaikovsky

What you might not know about Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky

His music is known the world over and remains a staple of the concert repertoire to this day: the shimmering fairy-tale worlds of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the defiance of the First Piano Concerto, the yearning melodies of his Violin Concerto. Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s unmistakable musical voice helped shape the sound of Romanticism. But who was the man behind the glittering façade of his works? A look at some (perhaps) lesser-known sides of an artist whose life was marked by inner turmoil, personal contradictions, and financial dependence.

Between hill and island
The conductor Hans Richter

Hans Richter secured his place in music history at the latest with his conducting of the première of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. Less well known is that Richter was also a legend of British musical life – and that he conducted the first performance of Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

A conductor from the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy, trained in Vienna and celebrated as a Wagner interpreter, rises around the turn of the century to become the dominant musical figure in London and the south of England – and helps Edward Elgar break through as a composer, not only in his own country but on the Continent too. Hans Richter (1843–1916), who came from a family of musicians, managed to bring together musical worlds that might otherwise have seemed impossible to reconcile. For a quarter of a century he shaped musical life in Vienna, and he conducted 77 performances on the Green Hill in Bayreuth. 

In 1877, he travelled to England with Richard Wagner on a concert tour and was welcomed there with open arms. His way of music-making evidently suited British taste: from 1879, London entrusted him for almost two decades with the direction of the Orchestral Festival Concerts, soon renamed the Richter Concerts. In Birmingham, he served for 14 seasons as director of the annual music festival, while in Manchester he launched an entire era as chief of the Hallé Orchestra, which he led from 1900 to 1911. For a time he also headed the London Symphony Orchestra, and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, he was the conductor audiences turned to for Wagner’s music dramas, which he knew inside out. 

That he was also a guest with the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducting around three dozen concerts with the orchestra in the last decade of the nineteenth century – including a tour through half of Europe in spring 1900 – is a further facet of this thoroughly European artistic life. What mattered most was Richter’s instinct for compositional individuality: it was thanks to this that a German-speaking conductor came to stand beside the most significant English composer of his time at the première of several of his key works – namely the Symphony No. 1, the very British oratorio The Dream of Gerontius and, last but not least, Elgar’s most famous orchestral work, the Enigma Variations.

Biography

Kirill Petrenko

Kirill Petrenko has been chief conductor and artistic director of the Berliner Philharmoniker since the 2019/20 season. Born in Omsk in Siberia, he received his training first in his home town and later in Austria. He established his conducting career in opera with positions at the Staatstheater Meiningen and the Komische Oper Berlin. From 2013 to 2020, Kirill Petrenko was general music director of Bayerische Staatsoper. He has also made guest appearances at the world’s leading opera houses, including Wiener Staatsoper, Covent Garden in London, the Opéra national in Paris, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and at the Bayreuth Festival. 

Moreover, he has conducted the major international symphony orchestras – in Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Rome, Chicago, Cleveland and Israel. Since his debut in 2006, a variety of programmatic themes have emerged in his work together with the Berliner Philharmoniker. These include work on the orchestra’s core Classical-Romantic repertoire, most notably with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony when he took up his post. Unjustly forgotten composers such as Josef Suk and Bernd Alois Zimmermann are another of Kirill Petrenko’s interests. In opera performances with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Richard Strauss’ Elektra and Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly have recently attracted attention.