The Bayerisches Staatsorchester (Bavarian State Orchestra) celebrates its half-millennium this year. That’s right: 500 years old – a symphony orchestra dating back to before such things existed, if you accept there being an unbroken line between the musicians at the Munich court in 1523 and the disciplined body of players making the Barbican’s beams ring here in the first of a pair of concerts with their music director Vladimir Jurowski.
On the way the orchestra has inspired many composers, not least Wagner, and they nodded to this with their encore, the prelude to Act 3 of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It had a sense of profundity that was almost devotional – a feeling heightened by the fact that so much of what had gone before was so vividly pictorial.
