Festival ›Ultraschall Berlin‹ II

Festival ›Ultraschall Berlin‹ I

Experimenting is the name of the game here. ›Ultraschall Berlin‹, the festival for new music, regularly presents new sounds at the beginning of the year in the Haus des Rundfunks broadcasting centre. Whether world premieres and first performances in Germany, works of the recent past, or classics of the avant-garde – ›Ultraschall Berlin‹ combines a look at the new, the wild, the unconventional with forays through the music history of the past 70 years. Organised by the radio3 and Deutschlandfunk Kultur radio stations, the festival continues the ›Musik der Gegenwart‹ series, with which the DSO has been bringing the most recent compositions to the Berlin stage in legendary concerts since the 1950s. In 2025, the orchestra will again be performing the opening and closing concerts of the festival.

Ultraschall – Festival for new Music

Vladimir Jurowski sees himself as a politically aware artist who intervenes and takes a stand on current events. The RSB’s concert at Ultraschall Berlin is therefore particularly characterised by current affairs.Olga Rayeva: On the seaMany of her compositions deal with the theme of the sea. This is no coincidence: her early childhood is deeply connected with two cities: Moscow, where there is no sea, and Mariupol, where her mother’s parents lived at the time. She was always very happy in Mariupol and dreamed her whole life of being back there one day, near the somewhat murky, green Sea of Azov. She would then walk along an alleyway in this southern city to the small theatre…Now neither the theatre nor the town itself exists.This is a personal tragedy for Olga. The events of the last few years have destroyed her to a large extent internally. And the only way for a composer to deal with trauma is to write music.Elnaz Seyedi: a mark of our breathElnaz Seyedi’s compositions are influenced by literature, architecture and the visual arts as well as her studies in computer science. The sounds often oscillate between rigour and delicacy. Her work “a mark of our breath” was premiered as part of the concert series ‘Miniatures of Time’ – a series of twelve short orchestral pieces commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk from various composers. They all deal with issues of our time, such as sustainability or the coronavirus crisis. Elnaz Seyedi himself writes about a mark of our breath:“The composition was created in 2021 during a stay in Wendland. Inspired by the expansive view with three quarters of the sky, which is different in every weather and every time of day, but actually always spectacular, and a landscape with a rich spectrum of green and later in autumn of yellow. The piece begins in this peaceful landscape, which gradually breaks up from within. The human voices – played and sung simultaneously in the brass instruments – are on the one hand part of this landscape, enriching it with their very special colour. On the other hand, their flipside is the destruction of the seemingly original.”Farzia Fallah “Traces of a Burning Mass” for orchestraLike Seyedi, Farzia Fallah was also born in Iran. Her orchestral work, for which she received the Heidelberg Women Artists’ Prize, was written during the protests against the violent death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in autumn 2022: musical traces of a burning, angry, freedom-loving mass. The concert can be heard on the radio on the following dates:Deutschlandfunk Kultur: 18 January 2024, 8:03 pm rbbKultur: 12 March 2024, 11:03 pm About the festival:The “Ultraschall – Festival for New Music” presents recently created works in a music-historical context that goes back to the beginnings of the post-war avant-garde, a period that now spans more than 70 years.In recent years, more and more premieres and first performances have been presented at the festival, and some of the works are also commissioned by the festival, but the approach remains the same: to give space to current trends in contemporary music and at the same time to categorise these current productions in terms of music history.

Ultraschall – Festival for New Music

The concert will be broadcasted live on Deutschlandfunk Kultur at 8 pm.

Abon­ne­ment­kon­zert II

Musik der Hoch- und Spätromantik, dazu ein Werk der Gegenwart. Christian Thielemann spannt in seinem ersten Konzert als neuer Generalmusikdirektor den Bogen von Mendelssohn über Schönberg bis zu dem jungen kanadischen Komponisten Samy Moussa, dessen farbenreiches Orchesterstück Elysium unter seiner Leitung 2021 in der Sagrada Familia in Barcelona zur Uraufführung gebracht worden ist. Igor Levit ist der Solist von Mendelssohns 1837 komponiertem 2. Klavierkonzert mit seinen ernsten wie lyrischen Tönen, während Schönbergs zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts nach dem Drama von Maurice Maeterlinck entstandene, opulent besetzte Tondichtung Pelleas und Melisande seine Verwurzelung in der spätromantischen Klang- und Ausdruckswelt demonstriert.

Kam­mer­kon­zert II

For more than six decades, the chamber concerts by musicians from the Staatskapelle have been a constant feature of the Staatsoper programme. This season, ensembles have come together to select music from different periods, styles and cultures under the theme of ‘playing together’. On eleven dates in the Apollosaal, which with its special atmosphere is an ideal venue for chamber music and communicative interaction between players and listeners, works from the Baroque to the present day will be performed in constellations that are both exciting and harmonious, in which tangible contrasts play just as important a role as a common resonance and the balancing of opposites.

Kinderkonzert II

Kinderkonzert II

Kinderkonzert II

Kinderkonzert II

Mu­se­ums­kon­zert II

Since 2010, ensembles from the Staatskapelle have been playing at the Bode Museum, a jewel in Berlin's museum landscape. Matinee concerts lasting just over an hour in the Gobelin Hall with music from past centuries can easily lead into further hours in the museum - for example, during an exhibition visit or a culinary finale in the stylish museum café.