Kirill Petrenko feels a special bond with the Karajan Academy’s new generation of orchestral musicians. Now the Berliner Philharmoniker’s principal conductor will be conducting the ensemble in Felix Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, a work filled with sunshine, clarity and energy. Chamber music precedes it on the programme: Mendelssohn’s miraculous Octet for strings and the sumptuous Quintet that Jörg Widmann – the current season’s Composer in Residence – composed for the Karajan Academy in 2006 when he won the Claudio Abbado Prize.