Concert Pulse
This season
In Hamburg
In Hamburg
1. Blaues Konzert
Under the direction of Omer Meir Wellber, the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra is adding a colorful accent to the season: THE BLUE WEEK. The new festival replaces the former Academy Concerts and combines unique works and programs on the one hand and showcases the special qualities of our orchestra musicians on the other. In the first edition, they make metamorphoses of all kinds audible - for example, in the first festival concert with Boulez's groundbreaking and enigmatic work Le Marteau sans maître, the instruments mutate into singing voices, while the singer repeatedly takes on a sound role without text. In a labyrinthine way, the work itself unfolds all its characteristics from a single small cell, as if from the sequence of our genetic information, from which first an embryo and then everything else emerges, without anyone arbitrarily intervening from outside. Sans maître - without a master - which means that although the composer has devised the laws of this act of creation, at a certain point the work generates itself like a living creative being, an autonomous morphogenesis. “There is no doubt that Le Marteau sans maître is not only one of the young Frenchman's most remarkable works, it also embodies a very specific ideal of form and sound that is typical of a part of today's avant-garde. It is the ideal of a feminine sensuality dipped in vibrato jelly, a feline hyper-refinement in which the velvety paws of the alto flute caress a deep female voice, which is, however, far more frequently scratched by the spread claws of xylorimba, maracas and claves. The sadistic aspect manifests itself with a strange level-headedness, as if clad in silk gloves: the corpses are hardly mauled, but dissected with very systematic and gentle cuts - a voluptuous exercise in aestheticizing cruelty, carried out by a truly aristocratic torturer with tweezers instead of a cleaver. René Char's melancholic-sadistic-surrealistic texts are sucked by the music into a labyrinth of high-pitched lamentations, into an ever more finely branching tracery of delicate sounds that only bites gently.” György Ligeti (1959)
