Cecilia Bartoli and Sir Simon Rattle: Silvesterkonzert with the Berliner Philharmoniker

A gala concert on New Year's Eve – what better way of ringing out the old and in the new! The Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle invite you to join them together with Cecilia Bartoli, who will grace the programme with arias by Haendel selected from her extraordinary repertoire. Also featured will be exhilarating dances by Brahms and Dvořák that happily combine characteristics of their own idioms with Slavonic and Hungarian folk music. The ballet music from Jean-Philippe Rameau's last opera Les Boréades will add a festive Baroque note to this programme.

Overwhelmingly brilliant colours and subtle sonorities also characterise Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, a work for the famous Ballets Russes whose bars of 5/4 drove the original dancers to distraction. In rehearsing for the premiere, which took place in Paris on 8 June 1912, they took to scanning it with the impresario's name, "Serge Di-a-ghi-lev." That helped.

This concert, recorded live on December 31, will be broadcast free of charge on medici.tv on January the 1st.

Cecilia Bartoli appears courtesy of Decca.

© Photo: Decca/Uli Weber.