Bayerisches Staatsorchester/Jurowski: Mahler 4

The Bayerisches Staatsorchester this year celebrates its 500th birthday, making it one of the oldest orchestras in the world, rich in tradition. As the in-house ensemble of the Bayerische Staatsoper, the musicians feel at home both in the orchestra pit and on stage.

In 2022 it was voted Orchestra of the Year for the eighth consecutive year by opera critics in Opernwelt magazine. The same year it won the opera and orchestral categories at the Gramophone Awards, with Korngold’s Die tote Stadt additionally being voted Record of the Year.

The Bayerisches Staatsorchester began life as the Munich court orchestra. Its origins can be traced back to the year 1523. The ensemble’s first well-known director was Orlando di Lasso from 1563. While the focus of its artistic expression consisted initially of church music, as the 17th century progressed more mainstream concerts and opera performances were added to their repertoire. By the mid-18th century, operas were being performed more regularly and today constitute one of the orchestra’s principal focuses. The world premieres of Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (1775) and Idomeneo (1781) were early milestones.

In 1811 the members of the court orchestra founded the Musical Academy which hosted Munich’s first ever public concert series, the academy concerts. Here, the Munich audience were introduced to musicians such as Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Edvard Grieg. Today, the Musical Academy continues to influence the cultural life of the city and the state of Bavaria. Alongside symphonic concerts at the Nationaltheater and a variety of chamber music series, the academy is also home to the ATTACCA youth orchestra and the Hermann Levi Academy which are committed to supporting and training musicians at the start of their careers. Through the company Bayerisches Staatsorchester Konzert GmbH the Musical Academy organises and manages its orchestra tours and symphonic guest performances itself. These regularly take the orchestra to the music capitals of the Europe, including Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Milan, Paris, Vienna, Lucerne and London, as well as further afield to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and New York.

Among the many great composers with whom the orchestra have been affiliated, Richard Wagner is prominent. In 1865 Hans von Bülow conducted the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde at the Nationaltheater. Three further Wagner operas were also premiered in Munich: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), Das Rheingold (1869) and Die Walküre (1870).

The orchestra has had a distinguished roster of chief conductors, from Richard Strauss, Hermann Levi, Felix Mottl, Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch to Georg Solti, Joseph Keilberth, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano and Kirill Petrenko. The orchestra also enjoyed a close relationship with Carlos Kleiber. Vladimir Jurowski became General Music Director of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester in the 2021/22 season.

Vladimir Jurowski was born in Moscow and began his musical training at the Moscow Conservatory, later studying in Berlin and Dresden. He made his international debut as an opera conductor with Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night at the 1995 Wexford Festival. Later that same season he appeared for the first time at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducting Verdi’s Nabucco. Since then he has appeared at leading venues, including New York’s Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Milan, the Paris Opéra, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, Dresden State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.

Between 1997 and 2001 he was Principal Conductor at the Komische Oper in Berlin and from 2001 to 2013 was Music Director of Glyndebourne. Between 2007 and 2021 he was Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, where he retains the title of Conductor Emeritus. Since 2017 he has also been Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and is additionally Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Until 2021 he was Artistic Director of both the International George Enescu Festival in Bucharest and the Yevgeny Svetlanov State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia. He works regularly with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the ensemble unitedberlin.

As a guest conductor he has appeared with the Berlin, New York and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Dresden Staatskapelle, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Boston and Chicago Symphony orchestras, Cleveland Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

He made his debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2015, conducting an Academy Concert whose programme included Prokofiev’s Third Symphony, before going on to conduct a new production of the same composer’s opera The Fiery Angel in the November of that year. He also conducted a new production of Der Rosenkavalier during the 2020/21 season. Since 2021 Vladimir Jurowski has been the General Music Director of the Bayerische Staatsoper.

Yefim Bronfman was born in Tashkent, from where he and his family emigrated to Israel in 1973. He studied with Arie Vardi at the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv before further studies at New York’s Juilliard School, the Marlboro School of Music in Vermont and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. His teachers in America included Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher and Rudolf Serkin.

He made his acclaimed international debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under Zubin Mehta in 1975, becoming an American citizen in 1989 and giving his first recital in Carnegie Hall that same year. A series of recitals with the violinist Isaac Stern in 1991 took him back to Russia for the first time since he left 18 years earlier. That year he was also awarded the Avery Fisher Prize and in 2010 he received the Jean Gimpel Lane Prize from Northwestern University. In 2015 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Manhattan School of Music.

Yefim Bronfman has performed with all of the world’s leading orchestras, while the conductors with whom he has worked include Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Riccardo Muti, Riccardo Chailly, Franz Welser- Möst, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Simon Rattle. He is also a keen chamber recitalist and has appeared alongside many eminent musicians, including Pinchas Zukerman, Martha Argerich, Magdalena Kožená, Anne- Sophie Mutter and Emmanuel Pahud.

His discography includes no fewer than six Grammy Award nominations. In 1997 he received a Grammy for his recording of the Bartók piano concertos with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen. His appearances with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester in September 2023 mark his debut with the orchestra. He is additionally taking part in a European tour as part of the orchestra’s celebrations marking the 500th anniversary of its foundation.

Soprano Louise Alder studied singing at the Royal College of Music. Among her prizes are a Young Singer Award at the International Opera Awards and the Joan Sutherland Audience Prize at the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. Between 2014 and 2019 she was a member of the Frankfurt Opera, where her roles includes Atalanta (Serse), Cleopatra (Giulio Cesare), Susanna (The Marriage of Figaro), Despina (Così fan tutte), Gilda (Rigoletto), Musetta (La bohème), Gretel (Hansel and Gretel), Sophie (Der Rosenkavalier) and the title-role in The Cunning Little Vixen. Guest engagements have taken her to the Vienna State Opera, Theater an der Wien, Zurich Opera, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, English National Opera, Teatro Real in Madrid and Glyndebourne.

She is also a passionate lieder recitalist and has appeared at the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg, Wigmore Hall, BBC Proms, Graz Musikverein, Frankfurt Opera, Bath Mozart Festival and Snape Maltings as part of the Aldeburgh Festival.

Among her accompanists have been Helmut Deutsch, Julius Drake and Roger Vignoles, while the conductors with whom she has worked in the concert hall include Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Simon Rattle, Daniele Rustioni and Jakub Hrůša. She made her debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2018 as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel, subsequently appearing as Marzelline (Fidelio), as Mozart’s Susanna and as Fiordiligi in a new production of Così fan tutte under Vladimir Jurowski. Tonight’s performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the orchestra is part of its European tour.