Klaus Mäkelä and Janine Jansen at the Concertgebouworkest

Schumann

A concert, says conductor Klaus Mäkelä, is a journey through time. The composers on this programme clearly show how much they were inspired by older music. Robert Schumann had just had a nervous breakdown when he wrote his Second Symphony . In this work he documented his recovery. In doing so, he openly referred back to music by Bach, Haydn and Beethoven.

Janine Jansen with Britten

Benjamin Britten's music is also a dialogue with the past. The influence of old English composers is always audible in his work. In his Violin Concerto he linked tradition to topicality: it is 1939 and the threat of war is unmistakable. Violinist Janine Jansen, with her extraordinary sense of mood and atmosphere, is the ideal interpreter.

Klaus Mäkelä

Klaus Mäkelä: 'In Schumann's music I always feel the tradition and the history. Tradition is also important in Britten's music. That's why we make a combination with the seventeenth-century works of Purcell and Dowland, which prepares us for the atmosphere of Schumann and Britten: later music in which the past is contained. I think the music benefits from it. The cathedral-like, almost sacred atmosphere of Dowland and Purcell strengthens those facets in Schumann and Britten and puts their music in a different light.'