„Of Angel Voices and Keyboard Magic“ – Grosse Tonhalle Zurich

Two masterworks looking back across the centuries

Empyrean Orchestra and the Zurich Boys' Choir under the direction of Kevin Griffiths, with the exceptional 16-year-old talent Justus Eichhorn at the piano.

This programme brings together works that connect past and present in a special way. Thomas Tallis and William Shakespeare belonged to the same great cultural era. When Tallis died, Shakespeare was a young man.

Some two hundred years later, Felix Mendelssohn turned to Shakespeare's world and, with A Midsummer Night's Dream, created music full of lightness, wit and enchantment, from the overture to the festive Wedding March.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, in turn, looked back across the centuries to Thomas Tallis. In his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis he transformed a sixteenth-century melody into a work of great breadth, radiance and spiritual depth.

In Beethoven Year 2027, two hundred years after the composer's death, our gaze also turns back to Beethoven. His Fourth Piano Concerto places the individual and their voice at its centre. Even its unusual opening, in which the piano speaks before the orchestra enters, lends the work an immediately personal quality.

This becomes especially clear in the slow second movement. Here the music takes on an almost recitative-like character. The piano answers the orchestra's stark gestures with a free, speaking line. Music becomes rhetoric, sound becomes statement and response, almost as in a Shakespeare play in which prose and poetry, dramatic gesture and lyrical intimacy meet.

The solo part is taken by the young exceptional talent Justus Eichhorn.

Fascinating connections thus emerge across the centuries. Mendelssohn conjures the theatre, fantasy and moonlight of old England, Vaughan Williams its cathedrals, memory and sacred soundworld, while Beethoven places the individual, their voice and immediate musical dialogue at the centre between them.