For the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the performances on November 26 and 27, 2021 in the Isarphilharmonie marked the beginning of a new chapter in its Mahler interpretation: with its designated new principal conductor Simon Rattle, the orchestra is now headed by a Mahler admirer every bit as ardent as his predecessors Jansons, Maazel and Kubelík. The musicians dedicated the benefit concert on November 26 to the memory of conductor Bernard Haitink, who died in October 2021 and was associated with the renowned orchestra for 61 years. The very long silence after the final chord was one of those “goosebump moments” that one goes to concerts for – and for which music is made in the first place.

Born in Prague in 1979, the composer, conductor and chorus master Ondrej Adámek, who studied in his Czech hometown and in Paris, has already won numerous prestigious awards for his orchestral, chamber, vocal and electro-acoustic music. In his musical language, which also repeatedly incorporates elements of distant cultures, he creates unusual musical narratives. He seeks the authenticity of his interpretations by combining voices and movements, gestures and theatricality, phonetic and semantic aspects, and his own specially developed musical instruments.

From 2003 to 2019, Mariss Jansons was chief conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Bavarian Radio Chorus. His death on December 1, 2019 marked the end of an era. As a conductor, Mariss Jansons was appreciated by the musicians of his orchestra and chorus like no other, he was loved by his Munich audience, and revered by his fans in international concert halls from Tokyo to New York. To create a place for everyone who wants to remember individual concerts or tours during his time as the principal conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, there is now a timeline on the orchestra’s website. All the concerts since his inaugural one in Munich on October 23, 2003 can be found there. In addition to documentation of programmes and line-ups, selected concerts are accompanied by image galleries, concert videos, backstage material and excerpts from interviews or rehearsals from the archives of BR-KLASSIK and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. These archives are continually being extended, so the timeline is worth visiting again and again. We hope that this “virtual collection of memories” will give Jansons fans all over the world pleasure in browsing and remembering.

The German-French composer Mark Andre (b.1964) is one of the most important representatives of New Music. His twelve "Miniatures" for string quartet were composed in 2014/17 as a commission from the Arditti Quartet, Bavarian Radio's "musica viva", the Festival d'Automne à Paris and the ProQuartet-CEMC, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Andre created his organ work "Himmelfahrt" (Ascension), funded by the Siemens Music Foundation, in 2018 on behalf of the Evangelical Church in Germany. The orchestral work woher…wohin was written between 2015 and 2017 as a composition commission by BR's "musica viva" in conjunction with the Happy New Ears prize for composition from the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation. The live recordings of all three works are now being released in the CD edition of Bavarian Radio's "musica viva" concert series on BR-KLASSIK.