Blog # 71. Start of the International Tour with Chamber Orchestra "Vienna-Berlin"

Our story with a unique orchestra – Chamber Orchestra “Vienna-Berlin” begins today. We start our grand international tour around Europe in a famous Musikverein. And I am pleased, that we managed to expand the geography of this tour to Russia. To my mind this is a very important and significant event in our cultural life. There are 4 concerts planned in Russia: 18th of May in the Great Hall of Conservatory in Moscow (within my original series), 19th of May in the Great Hall of Philharmonic Society in St. Petersburg, 21st of May – in Ekaterinburg, 22nd of May – in Kazan. And on 24th of May we will perform in Astana (Kazakhstan) the same program.

Chamber Orchestra “Vienna-Berlin” is a unique collective. It consists of 20 musicians (10 people from Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and 10 people from Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, two the most prominent orchestras of the world), this is exclusively string ensemble, and the professional level of each is that every musician can perform a recital in any world famous concert hall. And they perform without a conductor. So it creates a chamber music playing style, where every musician feels a soloist’s slightest move and musical dialogues and polylogs inside the orchestra create original sound of this orchestra. I find a great pleasure in rehearsals here in Vienna with them and looking forward to today’s concert and of course to recording a disc at Deutsche Grammophon with Chamber Orchestra “Vienna-Berlin”.

We have a very difficult (especially for this format of the orchestra – performing without a conductor) repertory. It is Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra  by Shnitke, which unexpectedly but in good time became a part of my repertory and The Concerto in C minor for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra, Op. 35 by Shostakovich, which I performed a lot of times and in which we will have Gabor Tarkovi, the principal trumpet in Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, as a soloist.

We also prepared a lot of surprises for our audience, so we look forward to seeing you at our concerts.