As I mentioned yesterday, this week will ride on borrowed material. Here is the source article about musical cities, and of course my first choice was my former hometown of Hamburg, Germany. Musical selections are my own.

Photographs are of the Elbphilharmonie, a controversial concert hall that opened a few years back, and surrounding neighborhoods. (For reviews of the hall go here and here. I have also written about it some time back here.)

As for music and musicians associated with Hamburg, there are quite a few.

Georg Friedrich Telemann lived and composed in Hamburg in the 1700s and was musical director of the city’s churches, followed by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, his godson.

Here is Telemann’s music for the admirals of this port city:

Here is CPE Bach’s Hamburg music:

Johannes Brahms was born in 1833, and composed his first piano sonata here. (So was Felix Mendelssohn, but he moved away as a toddler.)

And if a symphony takes 14 years to be completed, we should pay it tribute, particularly with this spectacular conducting: Brahms’ 1st, by Furtwängler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw266Ox-N8k

The city drew a lot of musical talent even if they didn’t live there for long or only came for premiering their work. Gustav Mahler, for example, was chief conductor at the Hamburg State Opera and premiered Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin there in 1890.

Let’s look at another Hamburg Great, John Neumeier, choreographing Gustav Mahler.

Erich Korngold‘s Die Tote Stadt opened in Hamburg at the Stadttheater with Egon Pollack conducting (and the same day in Cologne under Otto Klemperer, there was fierce competition…) As one of the greatest hits of the 1920s it circled the globe within two years of its premiere, including several performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The Berlin première was on 12 April 1924 conducted by George Szell. The work was banned by the Nazi régime because of Korngold’s Jewish ancestry and after World War II it fell into obscurity.

Here is the full opera in a praised production.

And here is Korngold himself, improvising on some of the themes of the opera.

György Ligeti was professor of composition at the city’s music academy in the 70s and 80s. One of his last works was the Hamburg Concerto, for solo horn and chamber orchestra.

And here you can see and hear what Ligeti‘s Le Grand Macabre sounds like in the Elbphilharmonie. Just be glad you sit in your own, more comfortable chair….The (full) opera is something else!

If you happen to be visiting the city and interested in classical music, it’s worth your while to seek out the Composers’ Quarter an association of various museums all in the same place offering interactive insights about Brahms, Telemann, CPE Bach, Mahler and Johann Adolf Hasse ( who I know nothing about….check that for my next visit!)