musica reanimata – Gesprächskonzert

musica reanimata – Gesprächskonzert

Stefan Wolpe was forced to flee Berlin after the National Socialists came to power, as he had publicly positioned himself against the Nazis as a convinced communist and artistic director of the agitprop theater “Truppe 31”. After an odyssey via Prague, Zurich and Vienna, where he took composition lessons with Anton Webern, he emigrated to Palestine with his partner, the Romanian pianist Irma Schoenberg. In Jerusalem, Irma was able to teach piano at the newly founded conservatory and Stefan also received a position as a composition teacher in 1935. His students there included Herbert Brün, Chaim Alexander and Wolf Rosenberg, who had emigrated to Palestine with his family in 1936. We will hear works by Wolpe from the Jerusalem period as well as early piano works by Wolf Rosenberg and the 2nd String Quartet, played by pianist Angelika Nebel and the Seneca Quartet. Pamela Rosenberg, the composer's widow, will be the guest of the evening.In cooperation with musica reanimata – Förderverein zur Wiederentdeckung NS-verfolgter Komponisten und ihrer Werke e.V.

musica reanimata – Gesprächskonzert

She was a world-class pianist and celebrated international success as a composer. In 1929, her Concertino for piano and orchestra was performed at the VII World Music Days in Geneva. She composed numerous chamber music works until 1935. After the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in 1940, Henriëtte Bosmans was allowed to continue performing as a pianist until 1942, when the National Socialists also banned her from performing and working. For a while, she was still able to earn a meagre income from illegal house concerts. Risking her life, she joined a resistance movement. She only began to compose again after the end of the war. Works for violin, violoncello and piano by Henriëtte Bosmans and a composition by the Dutch composer Rosy Wertheim, who was also ostracized, will be performed. Bettina Brand talks to flautist Eleonore Pameijer, artistic director of the Leo Smit Foundation Amsterdam, a foundation for the rediscovery of composers persecuted by the Nazis. In cooperation with musica reanimata – Förderverein zur Wiederentdeckung NS-verfolgter Komponisten und ihrer Werke e.V.

musica reanimata – Gesprächskonzert

The ordeal of some Jewish composers who were able to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews did not end with the defeat of Hitler's Germany. Only a few years after the end of the war, an anti-Semitic campaign began in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, which lasted until Stalin's death in 1953. Many Jews were sentenced to prison or even death in sham trials, and countless others lost their livelihoods. Composers were also affected. Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996), for example, who fled from his home town of Warsaw to the USSR in 1939, was imprisoned in Moscow. The composer, pianist and professor at the Kiev Conservatory Matwey Gosenpud (1903-1961) was dismissed without notice in 1948 and went to Kazakhstan to escape imminent arrest. Evgeniya Yakhnina (1918-2000), who came from Kharkov and worked as a composition teacher at a Moscow music school, also lost her job and was excluded from musical life for five years. Pianist Jascha Nemtsov and soprano Alice Lackner will perform piano and vocal works by these composers. Nemtsov will also be in conversation about the historical context with the renowned Stalinism researcher and Professor of European Contemporary History at the Viadrina University Frankfurt (Oder) Claudia Weber. In cooperation with musica reanimata – Förderverein zur Wiederentdeckung NS-verfolgter Komponisten und ihrer Werke e.V.

musica reanimata – Gesprächskonzert

Issay Dobrowen - today only remembered as a conductor - was one of the outstanding exiled Russian piano composers of the 1920s. His works published by the Viennese Universal-Edition reveal influences from Scriabin on the one hand and affinities with Jewish folklore on the other, for example in the Mélodie hebraïque op. 12, which will be performed in the concert. He enjoyed success as a conductor in Dresden, Oslo and San Francisco, among other places, and in the late 1930s he was one of the first conductors of the Palestine Orchestra (later the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) founded by Bronislaw Huberman. He had been a Norwegian citizen since 1928. In 1940, he fled to Sweden to escape the Nazi occupation of his adopted Norwegian homeland. Kolja Lessing has been studying the works of Issay Dobrowen for over 30 years. Together with violinist Holger Koch, he will introduce the fascinating piano and chamber music composer and shed light on his multifaceted work in conversation with Peter Sarkar. In cooperation with musica reanimata – Förderverein zur Wiederentdeckung NS-verfolgter Komponisten und ihrer Werke e.V.

MUSICA BAYREUTH

“In the rising of a symphony there is something divine, something similar to creation itself." (Leonard Bernstein) Life is in constant transformation and the world in constant change – and so, too, is the history of music! When eight-year-old Mozart composed his first symphonic work in 1764, the late baroque was transitioning to the classical era. The symphony was in the process of emancipating itself from its origins in the overture to Neapolitan opera. In this concert, our orchestra will perform two early symphonies by Mozart, who once said, "Creation emerges as in a pleasant and lively dream." Conductor Fabio Biondi specialises in bringing rare works to the stage, and thus this programme will feature works seldom heard from his native Italy. The Milanese composer Carlo Monza was highly regarded during his lifetime, but only a few of his pieces have been rediscovered to date. One of these is the striking Sinfonia "La tempesta di mare" of 1784, where the music condenses into a veritable storm. Giuseppe Sammartini was likewise born in Milan and later worked in London, where he was considered one of the greatest oboists of his day. His popular instrumental concertos were said to be "full of science, originality and fire". The talented Niccoló Jommelli came from Naples, but was successful beyond Italy’s borders. His opera symphonies in particular were considered exemplary and were widely disseminated as independent works from 1750 onwards. Our programme will end with a composition by another famous Wunderkind: in 1824, at the age of just 15, Mendelssohn wrote his extravagantly romantic C minor Symphony – an astonishing creation of which it was said: "New, beautiful, original. Spirit, flow, calm, melodiousness, wholeness, drama."

musica assoluta / Tanja Tetzlaff / cylixe / Thorsten Encke / Antje Boetius

The gentle sound of waves or the unpredictable force of nature, calming shades of blue or mysterious depths: All this is the sea – and it is a threatened habitat. Pollution, overfishing, global warming and noise are disrupting the processes in this delicate ecosystem. To mark the »Decade of Ocean Science 2021-2030« proclaimed by the UN, the innovative Hanoverian orchestra musica assoluta has launched a project that is making waves across all disciplines: »The Ocean is a noisy Place«. Boundaries between research and culture are being broken down, young artists are being offered a platform and the audience is always right in the middle of it all – together, they are becoming a brand-new mouthpiece for endangered biodiversity.

musica viva | Wolfgang Rihm

musica viva: Matthias Hermann

A feast of sound for Helmut Lachenmann: The horn section and the BRSO, conducted by Matthias Hermann, will present the world premiere of the final version of My Melodies. The composition opens up an enormous range of performing possibilities and reveals new dimensions of sound, transforming the music to an “object of observation” and the concert hall to a “place of adventure” (Lachenmann). Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Yuko Kakuta will perform Lachenmann’s Got Lost: a highly virtuosic piece in which verses by Friedrich Nietzsche and Fernando Pessoa are juxtaposed with a short note about a lost laundry basket. The three texts are “stripped of their emotive, poetic, mundane diction […], and sent into a constantly changing intervallic field of sound, resonance, and movement” (Lachenmann).

musica viva: Johannes Kalitzke

The Swedish composer Lisa Streich, winner of the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, has an avowed “interest in the beauty of the imperfect.” Her Jubelhemd, which blends together diverse sonic layers, is named after the work of the same name by Austrian artist Markus Schinwald: a shirt that, with its arms stretched upwards, can only be worn in a gesture of jubilation. After this “Concerto Grosso,” Johannes Kalitzke appears in a double role as conductor and composer in the premiere of his Zeitkapsel, a dance of death for large orchestra, commissioned by musica viva. The concert will conclude with Luc Ferrari’s Histoire du plaisir et de la désolation, a sonic search for “new sensuality” which brilliantly fails in the final Ronde de la désolation with the “rupture of all logic” (Ferrari).

musica viva: Jörg Widmann

The clarinetist, composer, and conductor Jörg Widmann is one of the shining lights of contemporary music. His credo is to combine tradition with new developments, resulting in timbres whose virtuosity, intensity, and directness both surprise and oftentimes confront the listeners, but also challenge them with quiet, fragile moments. The transparent, ethereal orchestral piece Armonica seems to defy the laws of gravity as it emerges out of nowhere. In the Trumpet Concerto, composed for Håkan Hardenberger, the sounds wander through space – like the trumpeter through the orchestra. A labyrinthine journey extending from wild and rugged orchestral abysses all the way to an open, utopian state of suspension.