Mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta, Ensemble Modern conducted by HK Gruber, and ensemble amarcord present a concert highlighting vocals. They perform a diverse program focused on modern works. Giunta sings Anna in Kurt Weill's "Seven Deadly Sins," contrasted by amarcord as her family. Gruber's direction avoids vulgarity in this social critique. Works by Schönberg, Hindemith, and Korngold round out the evening.
Composer Heiner Goebbels has been working with the Ensemble Modern Orchestra for over 25 years. In 2021, he offered them A House of Call – My Imaginary Notebook, an atypical orchestral cycle and a work of tireless searching.
The creation of the music theatre piece "Unmögliche Verbindung" ("Impossible Connection") is an adventure for both composer Ondřej Adámek and the musicians of Ensemble Modern. They're involved in the creative process and decisively shape the composition. The performance deals with communication breakdowns, a familiar experience. The experimental contemporary music theatre piece, a collaboration between Adámek, director Thomas Fiedler, and Ensemble Modern, makes the audience and musicians direct participants in the creative process.
A matinée of chamber music – but in this case a special event: in a strictly choreographed concert design, the Ensemble Modern traces the numerous experimental forms that composer Ruth Crawford Seeger employed in her brief career in the interwar years, from dissonant counterpoint to serial techniques. The third part of this portrait series presents the US composer’s chamber works.
In this programme the Ensemble Modern introduces the large-scale ensemble works of the American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger that are full of the delight in experimentation and the courage to pursue untrodden paths that characterised the 1920s. The futher pieces of this portrait concert also shed light on the present day, with the world premiere of a composition by the young American Katherine Balch and Tania León’s Ritmicas from 2019 – demonstrating where Seeger’s ideas continue to have a direct or indirect effect.
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.
The cresc... 2024 festival explores the significance of networks, exemplified by Gérard Grisey's monumental "Les Espaces Acoustiques." This cycle expands its acoustic space with each movement, starting with a viola solo and culminating in a full orchestra and four horns. Grisey's vision, composing with sounds rather than notes, creates a vast acoustic network, taking listeners from a small chamber to a grand cathedral of sound.
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