Nuits Transfigurées

« Schoenberg's music is where you least expect it. Admittedly, it answers point by point the founding myth of modernity, but it also builds its own collapse. Its attempt to rebel against the system is just as important as the modern system itself. What it resists is as unifying as what it preserves*.  »Danielle Cohen-Levinas

From Joseph Haydn to Arnold Schoenberg, by way of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, this programme offers a look at Austrian music through three focuses on key moments in its history. It is also a nod to the history of the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, for it has been almost half a century since the Symphony No. 49, known as "La Passione", entered its repertoire, on the initiative of Daniel Barenboim, who conducted it in 1977…

While he is protected by Prince Esterházy, Joseph Haydn, himself at the head of an orchestra, is able to compose and experiment. With "La Passione", composed in 1768, he plunges into the pre-Romantic current of Sturm und Drang (translated into French as "tempête" and "passion", or "élan"), thereby giving the symphonic genre a new legitimacy. Completed in 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's last Piano Concerto plays on the complementarity of the soloist with the orchestra, and opens up new horizons, where modulations and digressions foreshadow Romanticism. This is the very Romanticism that Arnold Schoenberg inherits when he sets to music a poem by Richard Dehmel, in which a woman confesses to the man who loves her that she is expecting another man's child.

A tonal work that draws as much on Johannes Brahms as on Richard Wagner, Verklärte Nacht, initially written for string septet in 1899, was transcribed for string orchestra in 1917, then revised in 1943 by the composer himself, and today counts among the masterpieces of music from the first half of the twentieth century.