Bellini: I Capuleti e i Montecchi

Anna Prohaska I & Pierre-Laurent Aimard I

harles Ives occasionally wrote songs that manage without a human voice – singers made such a fuss, he felt, he would replace them with a solo instrument. However, in the pieces chosen by Anna Prohaska and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the voice will take the leading role. Ives’s songs work with a broad palette of themes, wandering from childhood dreams to industrialisation, from criticism of society to autumn moods. They are contrasted with songs by Debussy and Strawinsky.

Les Concerts Cantabile – Canzoni di Corsica è Ucraina

Ensemble Modern I Porträt Ruth Crawford Seeger: Songs

The composer Ruth Crawford Seeger was not only part of the ultramodernist movement that sought to investigate the possibilities of music beyond European traditions, she was also a researcher into the folkloric music of the USA and influenced by the Theosophists. A woman of her time, the fast-moving inter-war years, and yet so far ahead of them – Musikfest Berlin and Ensemble Modern dedicates a three-part concert portrait to her that enables her musical world to enter a dialogue with contemporaries and present-day composers.