Riccardo Minasi conducts Haydn, Vasks, and Mozart — With Pablo Ferrández

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe returns to its home at the Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt for the 2026 Herbstgold Festival. Animating the hall where Haydn wrote and conducted for nearly four decades, the orchestra opens the festival with the composer’s glorious Symphony No. 88 in G Major under the celebrated direction of Riccardo Minasi. Renowned cellist Pablo Ferrández shines in Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1, a virtuosic and youthful work that was rediscovered in the 1960s, nearly two centuries after its original composition. By way of contrast, Pētēris Vasks’s powerful and poignant Musica Dolorosa provides a moment of profound reflection, written as a lament for the death of his sister Marta and for the Latvian people during Soviet occcupation. The concert concludes with Mozart’s majestic "Jupiter" Symphony No. 41, the composer’s last and longest symphony, composed in Vienna during the summer of 1788.

Photo © Kristian Schuller