Freiheit

Napoleon's troops were at the gates of Vienna when Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his 5th Piano Concerto. The sound of cannon fire? Yes, it can be heard in the first movement, but then Beethoven dreams himself away to distant and surprisingly tender worlds. Freedom through music! And music that is in the best of hands with a sensitive pianist like the Swiss Francesco Piemontesi. In Switzerland, more precisely in Tribschen on Lake Lucerne, Richard Wagner wrote the brightly shining Siegfried Idyll, overjoyed at the birth of his son. A family story is also hinted at in Richard Strauss' opera Intermezzo, where an unfaithful composer is cunningly pushed back onto the right path by his wife. Strauss himself wrote the libretto. Similarities with and allusions to real people were therefore entirely intentional. Violinist and conductor Renaud Capuçon and the Sinfonieorchester Basel present a programme rich in allusions.