Kammerphilharmonie Freiburg
St Cuthbert’s Church, Edinburgh, 29/5/2026
Kammerphilharmonie Freiburg, music director Andreas Winnen
Friday night is usually music night in Edinburgh and while the RSNO continues on tour and recording, it was a great pleasure to turn up at St Cuthbert’s Church at the end of Princes Street Gardens for a terrific concert by a visiting German orchestra.
The Kammerphilharmonie Freiburg is a fine amateur orchestra which, in a reciprocal venture with Edinburgh’s Meadows Chamber Orchestra, has arrived in Scotland for a series of three concerts in St Andrews, Edinburgh and Haddington. The Meadows played on a similar tour last autumn in Freiburg and district, sharing desks with some of their opposite numbers when needed. Apparently, the Meadows were well received and warmly entertained by their German hosts, and a reciprocal system occurred here.
The orchestra was founded in 1995, taking advantage of the high quality amateur musicians in this university town in the south of the country, in the foothills of the famous Black Forest, nestled in the wine region of Baden. I have sung there a few times in the past and found it to be a lovely town and region. Interestingly, it was the first place that Donald Runnicles worked in, on his brilliant career path to greatness.
Since 2002, Andreas Winnen has been musical director of the orchestra, and he conducted tonight’s concert, from memory, in some style.
The programme started with the overture to Mozart’s great opera, ‘Don Giovanni,’ premiered in 1787 in Prague, with a libretto by Da Ponte. The overture plunges us into the fateful music of the Commendatore, the elderly statesman murdered by Giovanni at the beginning of the opera, who returns as a vengeful ghostly statue at the end, to drag the Don to his doom. This eerie and frankly scary music is overtaken by the bubbly second half of the overture, perhaps to remind us that it is supposedly a comedy! I have listened to this overture scores of times, because singing the Commendatore (most memorably at the Coliseum Theatre in London with the English National Orchestra in the 1990s), I was called to the stage as a ‘beginner’ to enable me to rush on in order to confront the Don in the act of seducing my daughter, Donna Anna.
Rarely have I heard the overture played so dramatically as in St Cuthbert’s on Friday, and this set the concert off in fine fashion.
The next piece in the programme, contrasting wonderfully with the Mozart, was Ravel’s lovely ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’, a serene and moving response to the First World War, first heard in 1919. Written during the war, and initially conceived as a piano piece and later orchestrated by the composer, it is both a salute to the great French composer, François Couperin (1668-1733), and also a tribute to the fallen of the Great War. Ravel dedicated each movement to friends who had died during the war, and the form of the work remembers the old French tradition of commemorating a death in an elegant and restrained way, rather than a full-blown act of mourning.
Its four movements reflect that tradition in dance-based eloquence, starting with a Prelude, and continuing with a Forlane, a Menuet and a Rigaudon. The Kammerphilharmonie matched that eloquence with playing of breath-taking precision and style, with all the musicians relishing their moments of attention. In particular, I must single out the beautiful playing of principal oboist, Christina Uherez, while also commending Annette Bonner (flute), Felix Schaub (clarinet), and Sophie Bender (bassoon).
After a short interval, we were entertained by a superb reading of Beethoven’s underestimated 4th Symphony, a work which is often overlooked in the whirlwind of composition which gave us the violin concerto and the 4th piano concerto. It also lurks quietly between the two titanic symphonies, 3 and 5, but I have always liked its gentle charm and genial character. Sturm und Drang are all very well, but a nice stroll in the country can do one a world of good, especially in the hurly burly of modern life.
Written in 1806/07, it was first performed at a private concert in Vienna in March 1807 and publicly in the Vienna Burgtheater in April 1808. The symphony’s four movements are in a fairly standard form, with a slow prelude leading into an allegro vivace, a smooth adagio, a boisterous scherzo, with two trio sections, and a fast and thrilling finale, marked Allegro, ma non troppo. Mr Winnen gave full freedom to the orchestra throughout, with the finale breathtakingly fast, and we were treated to a rendition of this symphony which was quite marvellous. All sections were excellent, with the woodwind again exemplary, the brass spot on and the strings precise and together. The last movement could easily have taken its toll on the amateur instrumentalists, but the playing was technically perfect and wonderfully exciting.
I hope the good folk of East Lothian come in numbers on Saturday night to St Mary’s Church, Haddington, because this was an excellent concert by a special orchestra.