A few days before Christmas we will offer you a musical experience of a very special kind, a blend of the fantastic, the mysterious and the miraculous. We begin with the description of a night in Madrid: The city’s ghostly night watch will parade past us in a military tattoo. Luigi Boccherini originally composed this nocturnal sound setting of his chosen home, Madrid, for string quintet – it was Luciano Berio who gave us the orchestral arrangement. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s clarinet concerto transports us to the world of the miraculous. Before that, Berio’s Variations on Papageno’s aria from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute will take us into a world of amazing sounds. In his Symphonie fantastique Hector Berlioz brings us the collision of the wonderful with the mysterious and the fantastic, in a breathtaking ride between the dream-like and the real. It’s an extreme score, the musical aftermath of a drug trip. At the same time the Symphonie fantastique is a work with a unique artistic construction, in which the composer makes innovative use of the virtuoso instruments of his time.