Thu, October 22, 2026
Yulianna Avdeeva

If only we had orchestral music from her! Fanny Hensel left behind an overture, a few cantatas, wonderful chamber music, and a large number of songs and piano pieces. But when, at the age of forty, supported by her husband Wilhelm Hensel (and despite the reservations of her brother Felix Mendelssohn), she finally began to emerge as a "public" composer with published works, she had only a little over a year left to live. A symphony by Fanny Hensel will therefore never exist. Instead, the composer Detlev Glanert has now orchestrated her great piano cycle "Das Jahr" (The Year). This is no easy task, as the pianist, much praised in her time, wrote a delicate, transparent, and virtuosic piano style. The twelve pieces, each representing a month, and the contemplative postlude combine moods, impressions of landscapes, and chorales into a grand poetic whole. It has often been suggested that the trip to Italy that Hensel had undertaken two years earlier with her husband and nine-year-old son provided crucial inspiration for this work.

If Béla Bartók was indeed inspired by a landscape for his first piano concerto, it must have been a rather fantastical nocturnal scene: stark and pulsating, with a piano that seemed to belong to the percussion family, then again beguilingly sensual and mysteriously luminous. An imaginative, astonishing piece that has lost none of its power in the hundred years since its creation. Indeed, unlike Fanny Hensel, Béla Bartók could indulge himself gleefully as an "enfant terrible." The pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, established internationally among the very best in piano playing since winning the Chopin Competition in 2010, will illuminate all the facets of Bartók's music.

Program:
Béla Bartók - Piano Concerto No. 1
- Intermission -
Fanny Hensel - "The Year" orchestrated by Detlev Glanert.

Individual tickets for subscription concerts can be booked from August 20, 2026. Until then, please send us an email with details of the desired category and number of tickets.

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