Leonard Bernstein and Gottfried von Einem
The year 2018 marks the 100th birthdays of two great composers whose names are closely linked with the Carinthian Summer Festival: Leonard Bernstein and Gottfried von Einem. They loved freedom, each in his own way, and they pursued their projects uncompromisingly, defying mainstream ideas; this is what made them popular with the audiences. The overture of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide makes you want more operetta; it is as witty, ingenious, elegant, fast-paced and full of hidden meaning as Voltaire’s words. Bernstein composed his Second Symphony in response to the overwhelming experience of reading The Age of Anxiety by W.H. Auden. The book-length poem reflects the restlessness and disorientation, the sense of crisis pervasive in an entire generation. With clear jazzy traces, Gottfried von Einem’s early work Concerto for Orchestra is surprisingly close to Bernstein’s symphony, and so is Einem’s Suite based on the opera Dantons Tod, which directly followed the concerto. The four works for orchestra all mark the dawning of a new era in music after years of war and dictatorship.
Music of the 20th century – classics of our day and age – with the ORF’s Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. It’s also an occasion for welcoming back Markus Poschner, the new principal conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.