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The city of Hiroshima in southern Japan was once primarily known for its oysters which were farmed just off the coast. In Noriko Koide’s work Oyster Lullaby, the oyster is symbolic of the process of healing following the devastation that resulted from the use of the atomic bomb in the final month of World War II, an event that has overshadowed the city’s historic reputation. The new work for orchestra, commissioned for the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, will receive its world premiere on 14 June 2019 under the baton of Seitaro Ishikawa.



Koide’s inspiration for the piece came during a trip to the oyster beds while visiting Hiroshima – the composer was fascinated by the way they lay in narrow rows like a necklace moving with the rhythmic current of the waves. For Koide, the image of the swaying oysters connects the city’s past with the present day.

Unknown to man, the oysters have absorbed sad memories, since they end of the war they have cleansed and exhaled them, continuing with each breath to slowly bring tranquility back to the sea. - Noriko Koide

Noriko Koide: Oyster Lullaby – Oysters as a symbol of remembrance and cleansing

The healing and breath-like quality of Koide’s piece is produced through a myriad of unpitched, deliberately indeterminate sounds for each instrument in the orchestra and a wealth of percussion. The combination of these techniques evokes a delicate, fragile atmosphere out of which melodic lines appear with striking contrast.

The concert on 14 June 2019 will also include Toshio Hosokawa’s Voyage V and Frederico Gardella’s Two Souls.

 

• Noriko Koide - profile


• Oyster Lullaby - work details


• Hiroshima Happy New Ear

On 7 June 2019 the Villiers Quartet will give the world premiere of Alexander Goehr’s string quartet Vision of the Soldier Er at the idyllic Swaledale Festival. The piece comes after a break of almost thirty years since the completion of his fourth quartet.



The new quartet is inspired by the myth of Er, a legend that concludes Plato’s influential philosophical text Republic. In his programme note for the work, Goehr remarks about how it was an imagined vision of planets’ titanic movement circling the earth that inspired the work’s soundworld.

Alexander Goehr: Vision of the Soldier Er – A journey after life in six movements

Goehr’s work is divided into six movements tracing the soldier Er’s journey after having been killed in battle. The second and fifth movement of the quartet take their title from a poem inspired by the Vision of Er by the Gabriel Levin, a poet who’s texts Goehr set in the work To These Dark Steps op. 90.

Initially I was taken by the image of the planets, circling the earth each with a siren sounding a single note. I tried to imagine what this might sound like all together. In the 4th movement of my quartet “I beheld light beams fastened like a ship’s under girders,” I tried to portray (in microcosm!) the eternal image, taking a 6 part mechanical canon by Messiaen as a point of departure. – Alexander Goehr

Following the world premiere on 7 June 2019, the Villiers Quartet give a second performance on 8 June 2019 as part of a festival at Oxford University celebrating the music of Alexander Goehr and his past pupil Martyn Harry. The festival will also include performances of Goehr’s Nonomiya, and …in real time by pianist Jonathan Powell, and his Quintet for clarinet and strings by the Villiers Quartet and Ib Haussman.

• Alexander Goehr - profile


• Vision of the Soldier Er (String Quartet No. 5) - work details


• Swaledale Festival

On 28 May, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt will open at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. With musical direction from Alan Gilbert and a cast including Asmik Grigorian as Marietta and Klaus Florian Vogt as Paul, Korngold’s thrilling psychological opera is set to receive a daring production.



The opera, which is based on the novel Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach, was adapted for its stage setting by Hans Müller, Julius Korngold (Korngold’s father), and the composer himself. It took Korngold four years to complete the work, with first performances taking place simultaneously at the opera houses in Hamburg and Cologne on 4 December 1920. The work was an immediate success and went on to receive performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as the first German-language opera after World War I.

Die tote Stadt is a portrayal of Paul who loses connection to reality during his mourning for his wife Marie. Seeing his late wife in a dancer (Marietta), Paul falls in love with her. Despite his new love, Paul’s remains troubled by his grief becoming ever more obsessive with catastrophic consequences.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Die tote Stadt – Successful opera of the 1920s

One of the many theatrical aspects of the opera is the inclusion of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable within the opera itself. The sequence mirrors Korngold’s own music style which simultaneously uses the very limits of late romanticism in parallel with vivid melodic writing.

Considering, that after his death, Korngold´s life work was reduced to his impressive activities in the film music sector, one has to state, that the same compositional mastery, the same virtuoso orchestration art and the same theatrical feeling, which marks his film music, developed not just in Hollywood, but in his music theatre works already […]. – Maximilian Hagemeyer in a program note for Die tote Stadt

Korngold’s early masterpiece is enjoying a period of immense popularity, alongside the production at La Scala beginning on 28 May, there is a further production currently running at Theater Bremen. On 31, a revival of Die tote Stadt will open at the Semperoper in Dresden, and on 16 June a new production will receive its premiere in Wuppertal. The Bard Music Festival in New York will stage a performance of the opera on 18 August along with the first US performance of Das Wunder der Heliane as part of the festival’s focus on Korngold and his music.

• Erich Wolfgang Korngold  - profile


• Die tote Stadt - work details


• Teatro alla Scala

 

Photo: Teatro alla Scala / Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

On 25 May 2019, Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame opens with Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf in a staging by director Lydia Steier. The story of Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades) is centered on a destitute officer named Hermann, whose obsession with gambling and a secret winning formula of three cards ultimately fails to bring him the success he desires and leads instead to disaster.



The performance material used in the new production is part of Edition Meisterwerke published by the Hermann group, Vienna. The edition consists of each of the opera’s various forms including an initial version taken from Tchaikovsky’s manuscript, the version used in the world premiere in 1890 at the Mariinsky Theatre, and a further version based on the work’s first publication.

Edition Meisterwerke’s Pique Dame is one of the most popular works in the collection and has been used in recent productions at the Nationale Oper Amsterdam, the Opernhaus Zurich, the Mahen Theatre Brno, and at the Salzburger Festpiele. The inclusion of the opera in its various forms allows for scholars, artists, and opera houses to compare and contrast the opera’s different versions, and the flexibility to arrange their own unique production of the work.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Pique Dame – Compulsive gambling leads to tragedy

 

Pique Dame’s libretto was written by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest Tchaikovsky based on a novel of the same name by Alexander S. Puschkin. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky alludes to the opera’s setting in the late eighteenth century by combining his own expressive musical language with musical quotations and stylistic idioms of the period.

Either I’m terribly mistaken, or Pique Dame is really the culmination of my life’s work! - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Deutsche Oper am Rhein’s production will be shown eight further times following the performance on 25 May and in September, the opera will be performed at the opera house in Duisburg. Another production of Pique Dame will open on 12 October at the Aalto Theatre in Essen.

 

• Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky - profile


• Pique Dame - work details


• Deutsche Oper am Rhein

 

Photo: Monika Rittershaus / Opernhaus Zürich

 

György Ligeti once referred to his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra as his “artistic credo”. The 25-minute concerto is a tour de force of pianistic discoveries that has captured the imagination of pianists around the world. On 9, 10 and 11 May, Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs the concerto with the San Francisco Symphony, and Ensemble Intercontemporain will also perform it on 10 May in Paris and 11 May in Zurich with pianist Sébastien Vichard.

The period during which Ligeti composed the Piano Concerto was a time of pianistic inspiration for him with the instrument was presenting rich new possibilities. He had also begun work on his Études pour piano and it is unsurprising that several techniques are used in both works. The five movement  Piano Concerto takes his experimentation in the Études and augments the solo piano with orchestral colour, making use of multilayered textural effects and expanded instrumental forces including ocarinas and a slide whistle.

György Ligeti: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – Pianistic standard repertoire of the 20^th century

Ligeti’s Piano Concerto is characterised by its distinctive harmonic profile, created with superimposed scales with unconventional intervals. These, along with its complex rhythmic language, give the illusion of melodic fragments that briefly coalesce before disintegrating back into the larger musical texture.

I consider musical illusions to be important, and are not a goal for me but the foundation for my aesthetical attitude. I prefer musical forms which have a more object-like […] character. Music as ‘frozen’ time, as an object in imaginary space evoked by music in our imagination, as a creation which really develops in time, but in imagination it exists simultaneously in all its moments. The spell of time, enduring its passing by, closing it in a moment of the present is my main intention as a composer. - György Ligeti

In their concert on 10 May, Ensemble Intercontemporain will also perform Ligeti’s Violin Concerto and the Hamburg Concerto for horn and chamber orchestra. The same week, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra performs the Concert Românesc on 9 May and on 10 May the opera Le Grand Macabre will be performed in Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie for the first time.

 

• György Ligeti - profile


• Concerto for Piano and Orchestra - work details


• San Francisco Symphony


• Ensemble intercontemporain

Adapted from Dave Eggers’ 2013 bestselling novel The Circle, Ludger Vollmer’s new thought provoking opera re-tells the story of a powerful social media and technology company as it seeks to extend its influence further in peoples’ daily live. The Circle will receive its world premiere on 4 May at the Deutsche Nationaltheater in Weimar in a new production directed by Andrea Moses and conducted by Kirill Karabits.

Opera is central to Vollmer’s work who believes it can be used to touch all aspects of our lives. His operas Gegen die Wand and Lola rennt are based on films by Fatih Akin and Tom Tykwer respectively, while Border is an adaptation of Euripides and Schillers Räuber is based on Schiller’s Die Räuber. Vollmer careful choice of subject often explores current social issues by drawing connections with peoples’ lived experiences. The Circle similarly draws attention to the danger faced by a liberal society through the loss of privacy to the internet.

Opera has an ability to set up powerful emotional dimensions through music. The Opera The Circle illuminates Eggers’ plot and thus reflects a volatile social development. Is a liberal democracy diminishing the ability of its citizens to resist external rules? – Ludger Vollmer

Ludger Vollmer – The Circle: a worldwide bestseller on the operatic stage

The Circle follows the storyline of the novel closely, centering on the eponymous technology giant “The Circle” as it intrudes deeper into the private lives of its users. The protagonist Mae, begins as a low-level employee at the corporation before rising quickly through the hierarchy by committing herself to the system completely, revealing her entire life as well as that of her family and friends.

There will be nine performances of The Circle in Weimar. Sayaka Shiheshima is cast as the protagonist, Mae, and will be joined by Heike Porstein, Oleksandr Pushniak, Jörn Eichler, and Ray Chenez. On 8 June, a new staged production of Vollmer’s Border opens at Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern.

 

• Ludger Vollmer - profile


• The Circle - work details


• Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar

 

Photo: Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar / Candy Welz

The devastating effect mankind has on the planet is the subject of Thierry Pécou’s new chamber opera Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World, which will be premiered on 23 April at the Opéra de Rouen in Normandy. The opera explores its themes through texts written by Navajo poet Laura Tohe about the Navajo creation story and its connection to the present.

Nahasdzáán is characteristic of Pécou’s musical approach to incorporate non-Western ideas, music, and traditions into his compositions, informed by the composer’s own experiences gained while travelling. Native American cultures in particular have influenced a number of Pécou’s works including Symphonie du Jaguer and the cantata Passeurs d’eau.

Through our interpretation of the sacred stories and healing ceremonies of the Navajo people, I would like to draw attention to the dramatic wounds that human beings have inflicted on ‘Nahasdzáán’ (=Mother Earth), at the same time displaying the force of the Navajo concept of ‘Hozho’, uniting harmony, health and beauty in a single entity. At the end of the ritual which evokes mythological figures of the Navajo, the animals remain apprehensive: what new worlds will human beings create to save the earth and avoid catastrophe? – Thierry Pécou

Thierry Pécou – Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World: chamber opera inspired by Native American traditions

The Navajo creation story tells of four worlds, which are mirrored in the four parts of Nahasdzáán. The first, ‘black world’ is a kind of underworld, in which different deities and ghosts live. The ‘blue’ and the ‘yellow’ worlds are similarly only populated by supernatural forces, while the fourth, the ‘white’ world, is occupied by humans. The common factor shared by each world is the importance placed on animals, which similarly play an important role in the finale of Pécou’s opera, acting as commentators on the situation currently faced by the earth and expressing hope that it can be improved.

Pécou’s setting of the vocal parts closely matches natural rhythms and melodic contours of speech. This is in contrast to long sustained notes and expressive figures that characterise the instrumental parts of the chamber ensemble.

Following the work’s premiere, Nahasdzáán will be performed in Rouen on 25 April, and in Caen on 2 May. On 12 May, the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern will perform another Pécou’s works, the piano concerto L’Oiseau innumerable, with Jonathan Stockhammer conducting and Pécou at the piano.

• Thierry Pécou – Composer Profile


• Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World – Work Details


• Opéra de Rouen

On 17 April, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sir Andrew Davis will perform Sir Michael Tippett’s The Rose Lake (1991-93) at the Barbican in London. The work was originally premiered in 1995 following the request of Sir Colin Davis for a new orchestral piece to celebrate the composer’s 90th birthday.

The Rose Lake, which was the final orchestral work the composer would complete, was inspired by a lake Tippett visited while on holiday in Sengal in 1990. The lake itself is renowned for its remarkable pink hue - the result of an algae present in the water which produces a red pigment that is able to absorb light. Tippett’s visit to the lake had a profound effect on the composer who drew on the experience when he began composing The Rose Lake in 1991.

The Rose Lake: ‘A song without words for orchestra’

In many ways Tippett’s work parallels Debussy’s La Mer in so much that it is an expression of experience rather than a literal representation of the lake. Writer Oliver Soden, whose major new biography of Tippett is released this month, describes the work in his programme note as the composer’s attempt to ‘capture the dappled interplay between water and light and colour, and to chart a progression from dawn to dusk’.

At midday the impact of the sun was such as to transform its whitish green colour to whitish pink […]. As things turned out we reached Le Lac Rose at midday, just in time to see it turn a marvellous translucent pink. The sight of it triggered a profound disturbance within me: the sort of disturbance which told me that the new orchestral work had begun. - Michael Tippett

Following his performance of The Rose Lake, Sir Andrew Davis will conduct a performance of the Tippett’s Piano Concerto (1953-55) on 25 April 2019 with pianist Steven Osborne and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Further performances of Tippett’s music this season include his oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939-41) by the Philharmonia Orchestra (26 May 2019), Five Spirituals (1939-41/1996) at Aldeburgh Festival (17 June 2019), and Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938-39) with City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner on 19 and 20 June 2019.

 

• Sir Michael Tippett - profile


• The Rose Lake - work details


• BBC Symphony Orchestra

 

Photo: „Lac rose au Sénégal“ of Abrahami at Wikimedia Commons under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0, original was changed before using

Franz Liszt’s legacy as a composer is dominated by his virtuosic piano works and evocative symphonic poems. By contrast, the composer’s theatrical pieces remain relatively unknown despite a wealth of evidence, in the form of fragments and compositional sketches intended for his assistant Joachim Raff, that suggest opera was never far from his mind. The most developed of these are Liszt’s sketches for his opera Sardanapalo, which have been painstakingly reconstructed by musicologist, David Trippet. On 9 April 2019, Trippett’s reconstruction will be performed in concert in Novi Sad, Serbia.

At the beginning of the 1840s, Franz Liszt began to approach the idea of creating an opera. The composer consulted works by Goethe, Dumas, and Dante before eventually settling on Byron’s 1821 tragedy, Sardanapalus. By 1850 he had begun work on the first act with a libretto created by an anonymous Italian writer. Unfortunately, the text for the remainder of the opera proved problematic and remained largely unfinished.

The subject of Liszt’s opera centers on the Eponymous King Sardanapalo who would be the last king of Assyria. A king who enjoyed the love of his mistress, Mirra, much more than his duties, he is nevertheless convinced to go to war by his advisor, the statesman, Beleso. Ultimately the war is lost in the later incomplete acts, and in his defeat, Sardanapalo kills himself and Mirra by burning them both using spices and perfumes.

Franz Liszt: Sardanapalo – Impressing, reconstructed opera fragment

Liszt’s sketches for the first act consist of near complete voice parts and an accompanying particella which has allowed David Trippett to produce his completion in a way which closely resembles the composer’s original intention.

These gaps and the various forms of shorthand are not really that surprising when you consider he was writing this manuscript for his eyes only, i.e. he knew what he meant, and his musical memory was phenomenal; he only needed to notate what he felt wasn’t obvious. Unpicking this compositional process, and reverse-engineering the moments of creative decision making, if you like, has been utterly fascinating. – David Trippett

The upcoming performance of Sardanapalo will be performed by the orchestra of the Serbian National Theatre under the direction of Gianluca Marcianò. The work received its world premiere in August 2018, with the Staatskapelle Weimar the orchestra once conducted by the composer, alongside conductor, Kirill Karabits, soprano Joyce El-Khoury, tenor Airam Hernández and baritone Oleksandr Pushniak.

• Franz Liszt - profile


• Sardanapalo - work details


• Serbian National Theatre Novi Sad

 

Photo: Eugène Delacroix - The Death of Sardanapalus (1827/1828)

 

The 1940 Hollywood film The Sea Hawk is filled with wild sea battles, brave privateers, and pomous palaces; rattling sabres and crashing guns. The music for this early epic was written by composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and while the film is seldom shown today, its accompanying score has become a popular concert work. The concert version of The Sea Hawk will receive two performances in April: on the 3rd, the Orchester des Pfalztheaters and conductor Uwe Sandner will perform the piece in Kaiserlautern, and on 7th April at The Assembly Hall Theatre, the Royal Tunbridge Wells Symphony Orchestra and conductor Roderick Dunk will also perform the work.

Before his emigration to the United States of America in 1934, Korngold was already a successful composer; his opera Die tote Stadt had won him acclaim as a composer of opera in particular. In America, Korngold’s ability to tell a story through his music quickly made him one of the most in-demand composers in Hollywood. Over the course of his career Korngold wrote music for more than 20 films and won two Oscars for his work. Testament to Korngold’s enduring legacy, CineFix considers the soundtrack to The Sea Hawk to be number one in their “Top 10 Scores of All Time”. Korngold’s music revolutionised film composition and remains to this day the benchmark for many film composers.

In The Sea Hawk, Errol Flynn takes on the role of privateer Geoffrey Thorpe, whose story is based on the life of Sir Francis Drake. Set against a backdrop of the war between Spain and England in the late sixteenth century, Thorpe fights the Spanish fleet on behalf of the British crown. After many dramatic turns of events, Thorpe succeeds in warning the British forces of the incoming Spanish armada.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold: The Sea Hawk – musical frame for a cinematic sea adventure

Korngold’s film scoring is informed by his work as an opera composer, the use of leitmotif and harmony characteristic of late Romantic music draws a direct link back to Wagner and Straussian operatic traditions.

Music is music whether composed for the stage, the conductor’s desk or for the cinema. The form can change and the method of notation can be different, but the composer cannot make any compromises in what he considers to be his musical convictions. – Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Schott Music publishes two concert versions of The Sea Hawk, the iconic main theme as Theme from the motion picture with a performance duration of 6 minutes, and the more extensive Suite for orchestra which was arranged by Patrick Russ. At the concert in Kaiserslautern, listeners will also hear Korngold’s classic fanfare from the movie Kings Row.  On 7 April the symphonic suite, The Adventures of Robin Hood will be played at the Bürgersaal in Stadtbergen, and on 4 and 5 April in Tarto and Tallin, the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra will perform the composer’s enduringly popular Concerto in D major for violin and orchestra.

 

• Erich Wolfgang Korngold - profile


• The Sea Hawk Theme from the motion picture - work details


• The Sea Hawk Suite - work details


• Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern


• Royal Tunbridge Wells Symphony Orchestra