Mahler Chamber Orchestra

“Mozart is a figure particularly close to my heart. My admirers exaggeratedly compare me to him. Beethoven strikes me as a classical Roman, Mozart as a classical Hellene. I feel closer to the open, sunny Hellene”, said Maurice Ravel in an interview with the Neue Freie Presse Vienna on the 3^rd of February 1932. However, in his piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, which he arranged for chamber orchestra in 1919, he drew on the tradition of French baroque music – the Tombeau is tribute music for Ravel’s friends and colleagues who died in the First World War. The Sinfonia Concertante, which Mozart wrote in Salzburg in the summer of 1779, and the Linz Symphony, written in 1783 upon his return to Vienna, both bear the idealistic, classical and sung-through character that Ravel held as a mandatory profile for all art.

Founded in 1997, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) is an international ensemble of top musicians whose 45 permanent members come from 20 different countries and come together for tours in Europe and around the world. They are united by their intensive artistic dialogue. Their genuinely chamber music approach to music-making is reflected, amongst other things, in the fact that concertmaster Matthew Truscott regularly leads the orchestra in chamber orchestra repertoire. This fundamental attitude comes to the fore in collaborations with master interpreters such as Isabelle Faust and Antoine Tamestit.