A feature of Hugh Wolff’s term at the helm of the Frankfurt RSO has been his imaginative programme planning, juxtaposing apparently contrasting works within a concert, and setting an ambitious, over-arching theme for each season.

One of the fun things about being a chief conductor or music director, and also one of the most challenging, is planning a whole series of programmes. When I leaf through orchestra brochures I find it very frustrating when it’s just, here’s an overture, here’s a concerto and here’s a symphony. If you go to an art museum now, and see the way a show is structured – the order in which the artworks are placed on the wall, the text that they put next to the art on the wall – it’s really designed to take you to a big experience. I think a concert has to be the same way. And it falls on us to try to create programmes where the pieces talk to each other, or where there’s some kind of experience involved. I have tried to extrapolate this over a whole season: to give the whole season a theme or a name.

Themes explored over whole seasons at Frankfurt have included Fate, Heimat (Homeland) and Belief.

Often these themes are extremely broad, leaving a wide range of possibilities and opportunities. I’m not suggesting that you want to hear nothing but 19th-century church music for a whole year. You want to hear all types of music, but relating to an over-arching concept. That gets back to my interest in the context composers were working in. They are all grappling with the big human issues. We’ve had a season in Frankfurt on the theme of “Belief”, finding out how different centuries had a completely different take on this, and finishing with a couple of huge Messiaen pieces. So what did Bach think about belief as opposed to what Schoenberg felt about belief?

Maybe in some ways these themes are more important to me than for the audience. But I’ve certainly felt and heard from the audience that they find it interesting. And when you get the whole organisation on board, it makes a statement to the community that you’re about something.

If there’s a theme, it allows you to put pieces together in a programme that would otherwise never be next to each other, and say ‘This is why’. One example is a concert we did at the end of the 20th century in which we performed once piece from each of four centuries. We started off with a Gesualdo madrigal sung by a vocal ensemble. Then we did a Handel concerto grosso and a Beethoven concerto. And we finished off with a Luciano Berio piece sung by the same eight vocalists that had started the concert with the madrigal. Where would you normally encounter those on one programme? But trying to find one archetypal piece for each century made it work. It wasn’t difficult, but probably that programme had never been done anywhere in the world before!