Bavarian Radio photo from the previous evening’s concert: Emiko Yuasa (BRSO principal viola-player) between Steven Isserlis and Daniel Harding
Friday, January 30, 2026
Herkulessaal, Munich
Daniel Harding is currently travelling with Don Quixote, as immortalised by Cervantes and Richard Strauss, recently in Vienna (below, also with Haydn 49), and soon to feature with the Berliner Philharmoniker (in a relay to include Henze’s Barcarola), with Henze’s Erlkönig, a fast-paced, rhythmically vital showpiece to open in Munich, played with teeming virtuosity (Schubert’s Goethe song-setting at the heart of Henze’s orchestral imagination and dramatic reimagining), followed by the sacredness and storms/stresses of the Haydn given a highly cultivated outing, as in Vienna in terms of dimensions and tonal finish, perhaps addressed with greater intensity by BRSO. (Comparisons can be odious.) With Steven Isserlis as Quixote and Emiko Yuasa side-kicking as Sancho Panza, the Don rode off on his adventures once more in Strauss’s ‘Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character’, tales vividly told while retaining finesse, subtlety, and clarity, with Isserlis’s spontaneity and flexibility – seeker, a dreamer of dreams, musing, fanciful – adding alluring personality to the mix, Yuasa not to be under-played, chamber dialogue high on her agenda. There are numerous tight corners in Strauss’s score for everyone to negotiate; certainly the good folk of BRSO are adept at three-point turns, yet for just a few minutes it was Isserlis’s poignant response to the Don’s abschied that left the most indelible mark. A final sigh. A single audience-member “bravo”.
Hans Werner Henze
“Erlkönig”, Orchestral fantasy based on Goethe’s poem and Schubert’s Opus 1
Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 49 in F minor, Hob. I:49 (“La passione”)
Interval
Richard Strauss
“Don Quixote”
https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/56400