Kirill Petrenko: Opening the New Concert Season with Max Reger, Richard Strauss, and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

With masterpieces by German composers – Max Reger the late score “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart”, created shortly before the composer’s death, and Richard Strauss symphonic poem “The Hero’s Life” – Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra your main maestro Kirill Petrenko opened the new autumn concert season on the evening of August 25.

„ In times of great challenges, people have always longed for heroes and heroines who can overcome even the most difficult tests and the most unpredictable tasks.

2023/24 For the season of 2018, our hero theme reflects the different concepts of heroism that exist in music. In his Life of a Hero, Richard Strauss formulates an idea of ​​heroism that was completely new during his lifetime.” (Berlin Philharmonic)

We remind you that in February of this year, a Latvian violinist became the orchestra’s first concertmaster Vineta Sareika, becoming the first woman in this important and responsible position in the 142 years of the orchestra’s existence. Her first concerts at the first console took place at the Easter Festival in Baden-Baden, where alongside the last four songs of R. Strauss, the poem “A Hero’s Life” was performed with solo violin episodes played by Vineta Sareika. Also tonight, the soloist was a Latvian violinist!

Kirill Petrenko is the twelfth chief conductor of the “Berlin Philharmonic” in the collective’s 141-year history. His most famous predecessors are Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle. Kiril Petrenko, musical director of the Bavarian State Opera (Munich), was elected to this position in 2015, but officially began his career in the new position in 2019.

Kirill Petrenko was born in 1972 in the Siberian city of Omsk in a Russian Jewish family, studied piano at a music school. At the age of eleven, he gave a concert with the Omsk Symphony Orchestra. When Kirill Petrenko was eighteen, the family moved to Austria. He has studied conducting in Vienna and currently the press calls Kirill Petrenko the Austrian conductor. He started his career at the Vienna State Opera, then became the musical director of the Meiningen Theater and the Berlin Comic Opera, worked in opera houses in Florence, Vienna, Dresden, Barcelona, ​​Paris, London, Frankfurt, Lyon and New York, conducted many European and American orchestras.

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