The Berlin Philharmonic celebrates two composers in their anniversary years

When the Berlin Philharmonic returns to Symphony Center this month, it will offer a bicentennial salute to composer Anton Bruckner.

Under Chief Conductor Kirill Petrenko, the Berlin Phil will perform Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony in an SCP Orchestras concert Nov. 26. In their third recording project together, the Berlin Phil and Petrenko pay homage to another composer, Sergei Rachmaninov, on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

For Petrenko, the music of Rachmaninov has “an oversized significance”; in it, he finds his “musical home.” Released in January, the two-CD and Blu-Ray package is dedicated to the Russian composer. It presents four central works: the Second Symphony, the Piano Concerto No. 2 (with Kirill Gerstein) and The Isle of the Dead (Rachmaninov performed these works regularly together until he left Russia in 1917), as well as the Symphonic Dances, which he wrote shortly before his death. Issued by the Berlin Phil’s in-house label, the recordings come in a hard-cover box, with an accompanying book designed by the photo artist Thomas Struth and introductory texts.

“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,” Rachmaninov once said. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. Even with the disaster of living through what has befallen the Russia where I spent my happiest years, I always feel that my own music and my reactions to all music have remained spiritually the same, unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty.”

The set’s liner notes observe that the composer’s life was marked by “the tension between his longing for a safe homeland on the one hand and political and personal upheavals on the other. The latter required him to be open to changes. Rachmaninov anchored himself in his music — in works of hyper-romantic emotionalism, driven by unconditional expressive determination and the affirmation of outmoded beauty.”

"Rachmaninov’s music has an immense significance for me,” Petrenko said in an interview with the Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall. “Whenever I hear it, it’s like hearing a piece of my homeland.”

The Second Symphony has long been one of his favorite works. He conducted it at his Philharmonic debut in 2006 and also in 2021 at a concert that was to become a historic event. The Philharmonie Berlin had been closed to the public for five months because of the pandemic; concerts occurred in front of an eerily empty house and the cameras of the Digital Concert Hall.

Then, in March 2021, it was possible for 1,000 guests to attend a concert in the main auditorium of the Philharmonie, as part of a special pilot project. As soon as the orchestra and Petrenko walked on to the stage, the audience expressed overwhelming joy at their return — a joy shared the musicians. “The intense emotion of the occasion is clearly reflected in this interpretation of Rachmaninov’s insistently yearning Second Symphony.”

Like Petrenko, the Berlin Phil also has a direct line connecting the ensemble to the composer: in 1903, the orchestra performed his Second Piano Concerto, and once again in 1908, this time with Rachmaninov as soloist (his Berlin Phil debut). Still one of the composer’s most popular pieces, “it combines all the elements that give his musical language its immediacy: sumptuous harmony, pianistic brilliance, and the courage to provide virtually unlimited emotional expression.”