Liebestod

He seduces his audience with »witchcraft and Viennese charm« – these are words of the press describing the Austrian violinist Emmanuel Tjeknavorian when he was just 26 years old. And in addition to his outstanding career as an instrumentalist, he has been exceedingly successful as conductor. Indeed, he has come to the Gürzenich Orchestra as a violinist, and has chosen nothing less but the Violin Concerto by Jean Sibelius for this debut. The only solo concerto of Finland's national composer is considered to be the Mount Everest of the violin concertos: Many violinists have failed trying to reach the summit of this enormous monolith, but the listener is enchanted from the very first note by the Nordic, wide-ranged melodies. »I long for silence and tranquility«, Sibelius confessed before moving from the big city of Helsinki to a simple countryside house on the shore of a lake. It was there that he created the Violin Concerto in its very own, crystal-clear, irresistible language of sound.

Our focus shifts from the snow-covered vastness of Finland to sunny Verona, where the love story of all love stories is set – the allegorical tragedy about how prejudice, pride and convention lead to the catastrophic death of two young people. With his drama »Romeo and Juliet«, William Shakespeare became immortal, and Sergei Prokofiev no less, 350 years later, when he composed his famous ballet music for the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 1935.