Tagged with 'SWR Symphonieorchester'

Talking cats, living teddy bears and flying fish - quite normal! At least in Toshio Hosokawa's children's play Your Friends From Afar (German original title “Deine Freunde aus der Ferne”). It will be performed in Germany for the first time on 3 March 2024. Members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra will perform the German premiere together with narrator Rainer Strecker at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Hans Werner Henze’s oratorio, Das Floß der Medusa, with a text by Ernst Schnabel, will be performed by the SWR Symphonieorchester and Peter Eötvös on 15 November at the Konzerthaus in Freiburg and again on 17 November at Hamburg Elphilharmonie. The work was inspired by the 1816 maritime disaster and shares a name with Théodore Géricault’s painting of the event.

In 1816, the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the west coast of Africa. A shortage of lifeboats meant a hastily constructed raft was used in an attempt to ferry 150 survivors to shore. However, soon after setting off on the 30 mile journey, it became clear that towing the raft was impractical and the decision was made to cut the connecting ropes. The rudderless and ill equipped raft was abandoned to its fate.

Henze uses the tragic events to explore the moment where morality, law and social convention dissolve. In today’s climate, the work resonates as a critique on the response to the refugee crisis in Europe, with parallels to the thousands of lives lost at sea.

Hans Werner Henze: Das Floß der Medusa: A fight for survival

The stage is divided in two between the living and the dead. On the side of the dead is a soprano who attempts to lure survivors with her siren song. Jean-Charles, a cabin boy, represents the living and their struggle to remain alive. In the course of the performance the chorus crosses the stage from the side of the living to the side of the dead. Charon, named after Hades’ ferryman in Greek mythology, is the narrator and slips frequently between the two worlds.

Henze transfers the mood and characters from Géricault’s iconic painting to his music, for example using the woodwind section to underscore the living chorus, with ‘breath like noises’ and screams. The journey to the side of the dead is accompanied by the string section.

I had Théodore Géricault’s magnificent painting, The Raft of the ‚Medusa‘, clearly in my mind’s eye when I started work on the music. The pyramid-like pile of human figures in the painting, which is now in the Louvre in Paris, is surmounted by our hero, the mulatto Jean-Charles, waving a fragment of tattered red cloth at a boat that is seen sailing past the distance and that signifies hope and perhaps also salvation – an idea present in our own piece from the very outset. – Hans Werner Henze

As part of ‘Elbphilharmonie+’ there will be a lecture-performance on 16 November featuring a string quartet made up of musicians from the SWR Symphonieorchester who will trace the experience of escape through the music of Béla Bartók and Emin František Burian interjected with readings from texts written by refugees. The concert featuring Henze’s Das Floß der Medusa will be broadcast on SWR 2 on 26 November. In March 2018, Dutch National Opera will present staged performances of the work.

 

• Hans Werner Henze – profile


• Das Floß der Medusa – workdetails


• Elbphilharmonie Hamburg - program information


• Konzerthaus Freiburg - programinformation

“…Your son is leaving. He won’t be able to hear the bells of freedom”, wrote Konstantinos Sirbos in a farewell letter hours before his murder by the Nazis. Luigi Nono chose this and other similar letters as the basis for his work Il canto sospeso ("Floating chant"), which will be performed on 11 September by the SWR Symphonieorchester and the SWR Vokalensemble at Musikfest Berlin with Peter Rundel conducting and soloists Mojca Erdmann (soprano), Jenny Carlstedt (mezzo soprano) and Robin Tritschler (tenor).

During the Third Reich, many people chose to resist the injustices of the Nazi regime and most of them faced death as a result. Letters written by such fourteen- to forty-year-old members of the resistance from around Europe just before their death were published in a documentary in 1954. Nono's work sets fragments from these letters in nine connected sections and is dedicated to all those who lost their lives in the fight for freedom.

Luigi Nono‘s Il canto sospeso: Overcoming death through music

At the work's opening, Nono uses floating orchestral sounds to draw the audience in before the choir sings the first episode. “I’m dying for justice. Our ideas will win”, wrote a young man from Bulgaria. In the next episode, the three soloists simultaneously sing the words of three different Greek patriots. At the climax of the piece, Nono uses lines written by a condemned woman describing moment the Nazis came to execute her, with the music moving from heart-rending brass and timpani to a contrasting, stark string accompaniment. The soprano soloist then sings words of farewell from a young Russian woman to her mother, accompanied by the hums of the women in the choir and a selection of high instruments. The piece ends with the choir singing the words “I’m leaving, having faith in a better life for you”, with only timpani accompanying. Nono connects each cryptic text fragment with instrumental Intermezzi, creating an atmosphere of farewell, desperation, and bewilderment around the listener.

Now as much as ever, works dedicated to remembrance and reflection are of great importance, giving a voice to thoughts and feelings and even serving as focal points for discussion, talks, and educational activities. You'll find more works of remembrance by following the link below. In these works it is evident that composers at all times have deeply believed that music has the ability to remind, admonish, but also comfort and reconcile. Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein put it like this:

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

This year offers another opportunity to hear Il canto sospeso on 26 November at the Sendesaal des Hessischen Rundfunks in Frankfurt, Germany.

• Luigi Nono – profile


• Il canto sospeso – work details and score


• Musikfest Berlin