Conductor

Vladimir Jurovsky

• Soprano

  Hanna Elisabeth Müller

• Mezzo-soprano

  Emily Sierra

• Tenor

  Daniel Behle

• Bass

  Christof Fischesser

  Bavarian State Opera Choir

General Music Director Vladimir Jurowski opens the academy concert season with an explosive combination. Arnold Schönberg's “orchestral piece with speaker and male choir” entitled A Survivor from Warsaw is one of the composer's most deeply direct and confessional artistic expressions. Schönberg describes in succinct detail the suffering of Jewish prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto, which at the end experiences a moving turn into the utopian through a Hebrew prayer song. This is immediately followed by Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with its final chorus: a work of the century that, in terms of its duration and dimension, right down to the number of participants, breaks all previous boundaries. It is essentially a revolution in its combination of instrumental music and singing, and above all it is an emphatic appeal to humanity. Friedrich von Schiller's words in the final chorus are more burning today than ever, because this finale is the vision of a happier future - in the words of Aribert Reimann, "an appeal, a longing for brotherhood, for joy and jubilation, for the utopia of world peace, for one World without wars and destruction”.