Beethoven Academie - Reinhard Goebel

This concert, with Reinhard Goebel, artistic head of Musica Antiqua Cologne, stretches from Bach to Haydn to Mendelssohn. In his 'Sinfonia BWV 1048', Bach (1685-1750) thoroughly reworked the first movement of his third 'Brandenburg Concerto' by adding oboes, 'Cor anglais' and horns to the strings. This created a work with a completely different texture. Goebel, a Baroque specialist, tackles this score with a modern chamber orchestra. The Violin Concerto in E minor is rightly one of Mendelssohn's best-known pieces. It is quite plainly one of the highlights of his symphonic work. He masterfully combines virtuosity and lyricism in movements that merge into one another without interruption. Haydn's Symphony no. 104 was named after the man who took the composer to London, the impresario and concert organiser Johann Peter Salomon. This was Haydn's final symphonic composition, in which with a hint of melancholy he took his leave of a genre he had developed more than anyone else and - certainly in the London Symphonies - had taken to unprecedented heights.