The Stuttgarter Philharmoniker celebrates Dan Ettinger’s birthday with a fantastic concert featuring stunning music by Paul Ben-Haim and Richard Strauss. The event will be streamed in IDAGIO’s Global Concert Hall on June 10 at 6pm CEST / 12 pm ET and is available to watch until December 31, 2021.

Paul Ben-Haim fled Germany in the 1930s and became one of the founders of modern Israeli music. In Israel, he intensively studied the music of the Sephardic Jews and developed a personal style that combines Central European compositional techniques and Middle Eastern musical traditions. His song cycle on texts from the Bible and the Hebrew Middle Ages envelops the singing voices in impressionistic orchestral colours.

Ben-Haim’s older colleague and compatriot Richard Strauss (born in 1864, also in Munich) conducted a theatrical experiment with Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Stuttgart in 1912: Molière’s comedy Der Bürger als Edelmann was to be performed on one evening together with the one-act opera Ariadne auf Naxos in an adaptation by the two men. Strauss composed incidental music for the spoken comedy in witty, neo-Baroque style. But the experiment met with little approval from the people of Stuttgart. Strauss created a suite out of his incidental music for the concert hall to ensure that the music was not lost.

For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit IDAGIO’s Global Concert Hall.

Photo: Jürgen Altmann