The NDR Sinfonieorchester and Christoph von Dohnányi gave the official opening concert of the 2006 Schleswig-Holstein Festival at the Musik- und Kongreßhalle in Lübeck where, almost half a century earlier, the conductor had filled the post of General Music Director at the opera house for seven years. According to the Hamburger Morgenpost, Christian Zacharias and the NDR musicians gave a ‘gripping, analytically clear’ performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, before Dohnányi led Mahler’s First Symphony in an ‘enthralling’ account, ‘full of the voices of nature’.