“Almost a miracle of precision, sound differentiation and darkened, luminous colors” was the result when Anton Webern arranged Franz Schubert's “Six German Dances” for piano for small orchestra, woodwinds and two horns in 1931, according to the Universal Edition website, which commissioned the work at the time. The brief was to “allow the structure of the work to emerge more clearly and to preserve a sound close to Schubert's” - something to look forward to at the beginning of this concert conducted by Matthias Pintscher.

 “Nur” follows, a work by Pintscher whose title means “fire” in both Arabic and Hebrew. He composed his first piece for piano and ensemble in 2018/19 for Daniel Barenboim and the Barenboim-Said Academy: „I started thinking about this instrumentation from scratch when I was asked by Daniel Barenboim to write for this special ‘west-eastern’ orchestra and him. The solo instrument and the ensemble are partners; it's not a concerto in the usual sense, but an encounter at eye level, a real dialogical music-making.“ The soloist on the piano is the young American pianist Conrad Tao.

Highly acclaimed as a pianist, composer Rachmaninov experienced a rollercoaster of emotions when it came to premieres of his symphonies. The first was a flop, the second was celebrated. In the Third, which combines Romanticism and Modernism, he dared to try something new, such as three movements instead of four and fast passages in the slow middle movement. The audience was not enthusiastic and one critic's sour comment that Rachmaninov probably no longer had a third symphony in him hurt the composer deeply. He would be reconciled by the fact that this view no longer meets with approval today.