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’s place in music history was assured when he conducted 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 one of the leading musical figures in London and the south of England. He plays a decisive role in Edward Elgar’s emergence 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 musical approach evidently struck a chord with British audiences: 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 began a long association with the Hallé Orchestra, which he led from 1900 to 1911. He also served as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for a time, and at Covent Garden, he became the house’s Wagner specialist. 

His guest appearances with the Berliner Philharmoniker—including around three dozen concerts in the 1890s and a major European tour in the spring of 1900—were another facet of this remarkably European career. That instinct led him to champion Edward Elgar, standing beside England’s greatest composer of the age at the premières of some of his most important works: the First Symphony, the quintessentially English oratorio The Dream of Gerontiusand, above all, 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.