The multi-award-winning composer Christian Mason (*1984) sees his work as a “search in sounds for fleeting consolidations of intangible experiences”. His work with the suggestive title “An Ocean of Years” will be performed as a world premiere by the Konzerthausorchester Berlin under our principal conductor Christoph Eschenbach.

George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F” is rarely performed, but well worth hearing. For the work, composed in 1925, one year after the enormous success of “Rhapsody in Blue”, Gershwin created his own style, influenced by jazz, Broadway songs, dance rhythms and late Romantic harmonies: “Many people believed that the ‘Rhapsody’ was just a happy accident. So I set out to show them that I had a lot more going for me than that.” At the premiere, he himself sat at the piano; for us, Tzimon Barto will perform as soloist.

Arnold Schoenberg, the “inventor” of the modern twelve-tone system of composition, earned his living as an arranger as a young man. And he loved Brahms. He justified his arrangement of Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor, heard as the last piece, succinctly: “1. I like the piece. 2. It is rarely played. 3. It is always played very badly, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing of the strings. I wanted to hear everything for once, and I achieved that.”