New Year's Eve Concert - Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Delyana Lazarova

“When Unsuk Chin composed ‘subito con forza’ for Beethoven’s 250th birthday, she did not polish the monument. She shattered it. Fragments of Beethoven’s music emerge in a modern soundscape—urgent, fleeting, questioning. By placing Chin’s music alongside the Ninth, we hear Beethoven not as a distant statue, but as an unfinished work. As a conductor and as someone who is educating a generation that will live after us, I feel this question deeply: What remains of Beethoven’s belief in brotherhood? The world around us is turbulent, divided, and often marked by fear. And yet orchestras still bring strangers together in one room and invite them to listen together. Perhaps that is the true essence of the Ninth Symphony—not in history, but in our willingness to keep trying.” (Delyana Lazarova, February 2026)

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