Symphonie Nr.2

Leonard Bernstein has been conducting regularly in Munich since the 1980s. During that time he came to appreciate and love especially the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. After an engagement in October 1976, when Bernstein performed with a program dedicated exclusively to Beethoven, the series of annual concerts began in 1983. In November of that year he rehearsed the Second Symphony by Robert Schumann and his own Divertimento (1980), which were performed in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz in Munich. This BR-KLASSIK CD presents the live recording of this concert event. Bernstein was a commendable advocate of Robert Schumann's Second Symphony - a work from 1845 that was repeatedly regarded as still immature and in need of improvement, and which Schumann himself admitted he had written in poor health. Bernstein's Divertimento, composed in 1980 for the 100th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, consists of eight miniatures developed from the half-step B-C. It begins with a fanfare and proceeds via a waltz, a mazurka, a samba and a blues to a march with reminiscences of the "Radetzky March". The music is jazz-like, fond of syncopation, with unusual time signatures and a dance-like swing. He also draws from memories of his first concerts with a popular program, which he attended as a child with his father in Symphony Hall in Boston. The live recording was made on 10 and 11 November 1983 in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz in Munich.