Tagged with 'Frankfurt'

A true re-discovery for the opera stage: Wolfgang Fortner's In seinem Garten liebt Don Perlimplin Belisa (‘Don Perlimplin’s Love for Belisa in His Garden’), will celebrate its premiere at Oper Frankfurt on 22 March 2024. The opera can be seen at the Bockenheimer Depot in a new production by Dorothea Kirschbaum, performed by the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra under the direction of Takeshi Moriuchi. The two title roles are sung by Karolina Bengtsson as Belisa and Sebastian Geyer as Don Perlimplín.

The anti-anti-opera: Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti will celebrate its premiere at the Frankfurt Opera on November 5, 2023. Vasily Barhatov will direct the production at the "Opera House of the Year", which has just been named in the music critics' survey of Opernwelt magazine. The new general music director Thomas Guggeis will be conducting in the pit, while the "Opera Choir of the Year" will perform on stage, along with many solos. This is the first of four major productions of the work in the current season, which celebrates the 100th birthday of Ligeti, who was born in 1923. At Vienna, the State Opera is opening the new production by director Jan Lauwers on November 11, with Pablo Heras-Casado conducting.

The Seven Deadly Sins (Die sieben Todsünden) is one of Kurt Weill’s best-known and most frequently performed works. On 21 September, a new orchestration of the ballet chanté for 15 players will receive its premiere at Beethovenfest Bonn with Ensemble Modern and soloist Sarah Maria Sun conducted by HK Gruber. The new version has been created by Gruber and Christian Muthspiel in collaboration with the Kurt Weill Foundation and Schott Music.

The Brecht text is not a period piece. It is absolutely contemporary. In our day The Seven Deadly Sins is a manifesto against capitalism run amok, and it's a dangerous piece - for the capitalists. Because it lays bare how the world works: if you are honest, you have to pay the price, here, during this life. It is even more timely than it was twenty or thirty years ago.  (HK Gruber)

The Seven Deadly Sins: An Iconic Work in a New Orchestration

Initiated by the Kurt Weill Foundation, the new orchestration of The Seven Deadly Sins will for the first time enable fully staged performances by smaller ensembles, theatres and dance companies. The work has received innumerable successful interpretations and the new version will open up further possibilities for creative productions in even more varied settings. The soprano soloist in Gruber and Muthspiel’s version is accompanied by a male vocal quartet and the following ensemble: 1(pic).0.2.1-1.1.1.0-perc-pno.banjo(gtr)-str(1.1.1.1.1)

HK Gruber is regarded as a leading Weill expert, having frequently conducted, performed and recorded The Seven Deadly Sins and other works throughout his career. This new orchestration is characterised by its high level of fidelity to the original work, retaining Weill's original keys and using the ensemble in innovative ways to match the characteristic timbres of the orchestral version.

Playing on double-standards that are placed on the sisters, Anna 1 and Anna 2, as they make their seven-year journey through different US cities, the highly ironic and satirical work features some of Weill’s most recognisable music. It incorporates numerous popular American musical styles including foxtrot, polka, and barbershop. Despite being sung in German, the work was a success at its premiere performance in 1933 in Paris where Weill was living in exile, and it received a UK premiere at the Savoy Theatre that same year.

• Kurt Weill – composer profile


• Work details and online score (original version)


• Work details and online score (new Gruber/Muthspiel version)


• Ensemble Modern website

photo: Staatstheater Stuttgart / Bernhard Weis

On 25 November, Ensemble Modern will give a concert focused on the music of Alexander Goehr at the Wigmore Hall in London, including the UK premiere of his major song cycle Vanishing Word with mezzo-soprano Lucy Schaufer and tenor Christopher Gillet. The following day, the same performers present the concert at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, marking the work’s German premiere.

First composed in 2013 for two voices and piano, Vanishing Word is a cycle of songs, duets and instrumental pieces orchestrated in 2015 for mezzo soprano, tenor and ensemble. The work explores the ambiguities of words, of ideas, and of human understanding. Goehr has set seven texts by six different authors, among them Jakob Böhme, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ingeborg Bachmann, that address in some manner man’s distance from nature and the ways in which language and meaning diverge over time. Between the sung movements, the words ‘vanish’ in five instrumental preludes.

Vanishing Word: The meaning of meaning

Vanishing Word begins with a metaphor of language as a tree, as described by the 17th century German mystic Jakob Böhme. Through growth and separations, the universal language of nature becomes divided into increasingly weaker languages. In the second song Goehr sets the story of how Adam was ordered by God to assign a name to each animal, and the following texts are settings of poems which reflect on the nature and use of words. The texts captured Goehr’s attention while he was working on his earlier song cycle for baritone TurmMusik (2009) which tells the biblical story of the Tower of Babylon, and is thus related thematically to Vanishing Word.

Vanishing Word had its world premiere on 22 January 2016 in New York by the Juilliard Ensemble, after which the cycle was lauded for its combination of mysticism and transparency.

The impression I aim to create is one of transparency: the listener should perceive, both in the successive and simultaneous dimensions of the score, the old beneath the new and the new arising from the old. – Alexander Goehr

Alongside Vanishing Word, Ensemble Modern will give the world premiere of two other pieces by Goehr, Manere II for clarinet and horn and Manere III for clarinet, horn and violin, to complement Goehr’s existing Manere I (2008). The title ‘Manere’ refers to a particular melisma from Gregorian chant that, for several centuries, was frequently used in works by composers including by Pérotin and Machaut before largely disappearing.

• Alexander Goehr - Profile


• Vanishing Word - Details


• Wigmore Hall 


• Alte Oper Frankfurt