Together with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his magnificent Monteverdi Choir, the MCO is embarking on a long Schumann tour in February 2012. The central work on the programme will be Schumann's Incidental Music to Lord Byron's Manfred, with an abridged text created especially for this tour. Also joining the project in the role of speaker is Gert Voss, one of the most significant German actors today.

Berlin, 31 January 2012 – The Mahler Chamber Orchestra has wished for many years to play under the baton of British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Now, the first programme in collaboration with him will consist of choral and orchestral works by Schumann, a composer Gardiner is renowned for both studying and performing. Gardiner’s recordings – made with original instruments and based on a faithful, scholarly approach to Schumann’s scores – have fundamentally influenced the way we understand the composer. Together with the Monteverdi Choir, which he has led now for nearly 50 years, Gardiner set new standards in the repertoire for chorus and orchestra.

The central piece on the programme will be Schumann’s Incidental music to Manfred by Lord Byron. The great German actor and Vienna Burgtheater star, Gert Voss, will appear as the speaker. Together with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Gert and Ursula Voss, MCO cellist Philipp von Steinaecker, who serves as Gardiner’s assistant, created an abridged version of the text especially for this tour, as the original version, nearly two hours in length, would have been too long for the concert format. The text is now arranged in such a way as to support and intensify Byron’s technique of illuminating various aspects of Manfred’s character through a series of encounters with other persons. In the new version of the text only two characters are present in each scene, Manfred and one other, and all are played by Gert Voss.

In undertaking the task of cutting more than half of the text, Philipp was committed to retaining the order of scenes so as not to change the dramaturgy of the music. Every word of the resulting text is original Byron: nothing was altered or added. In particular, the texts immediately before and after musical interludes remain exactly as in the original so that the music always reacts to or prepares the way for the same words that inspired Schumann. The complete text will be recited and sung in German, with super-titles in the language of the host country.

The programme also includes Schumann’s Symphony no. 4 and the rarely performed choral works Requiem for Mignon and Nachtlied. The solo parts will be performed by the outstanding singers of the Monteverdi Choir.

The rehearsal period and the first concert of the tour take place in the northern Italian city of Ferrara (7 February), where the MCO has been in residence since 1998. Both of the next two concerts are debuts for the MCO on the Canary Islands – first in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (10 February) and then Las Palmas (11 February), as part of the Festival de Musica de Canarias. The MCO then stays for two days in Barcelona to play a concert at the Palau Música Catalana (13 February), followed by a Mahler Chamber Soloists Club Concert for a young audience (14 February). As part of the MCO's educational activities, the orchestra will also continue its work in Barcelona with the youth orchestra Jove Orquestra Nacional de Catalunya (JONC). The tour comes to an end with a concert in Madrid (15 February), where the orchestra appears regularly.