Young People's Concert - Wagner's own favourite: Siegfried Idyll (C2)

Abu Dhabi Classics has selected a particularly apt piece for its first young people’s concert of the new season, to be given the morning of 7 October at the Emirates Palace Auditorium: Richard Wagner’s charming Siegfried Idyll. Commemorating the birth of their son Siegfried, Wagner composed it for his wife Cosima’s birthday on Christmas Eve 1870 and first performed it for her the next morning at the couple’s Swiss country villa. The delicately scored piece, which quotes a lullaby written by Wagner the year before, is based on themes that would reappear in the “Ring” opera Siegfried, premiered in 1876 in his new Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The work is in safe hands in Abu Dhabi, performed by Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra – voted the world’s finest in Gramophone magazine’s recent poll of international critics.