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On 6 July, Jörg Widmann’s Messe for orchestra will be performed by the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich with whom Widmann has held the title of ‘Creative Chair’ for the 2015/16 season.



First awarded in the 2014/15 season, the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich’s ‘Creative Chair’ creates a position for eminent composers, conductors and soloists to work with the orchestra, as well as to share their knowledge through workshops, lectures and discussion sessions. On 6 July, Widmann will also perform as the soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major.

Messe is one of a trilogy of orchestral works by Widmann, alongside Lied (2003) and Chor (2004), exploring the idea of vocal music for orchestral forces where the orchestra is used both as the soloist and choir. Messe also touches on the composer's academic interest in spiritual music. This work marked a turning point in Widmann's compositional style along with his fifth string quartet with soprano Versuch über die Fuge, which challenged him to use strict musical forms. Techniques that he had previously avoided set the tone for each movement in Messe.

The instrumental singing is the topic of my earlier orchestral works 'Lied' and 'Chor'. There is no singer or choir performing; the orchestra is singing, reciting and declaiming. That’s how it is with Messe: The musicians are the protagonists: Solos, choir and orchestra rolled into one. For example, there is an antiphony between choir and organ in the ‘Monodia’ of the ‘Kyrie’, but no choir or organ is really involved. In central liturgical passages, for example at the beginning of the ‘Kyrie’ or the ‘Gloria’, the notes appear like a gigantic choral score. Every musician ‘sings’ the particular mass text on his instrument. – Jörg Widmann

In performances between 6-8 July, Widmann will conduct Messe at the Tonhalle Zürich. Other upcoming performances of Widmann’s works include Versuch über die Fuge for soprano, oboe and chamber orchestra performed by the Saarländisches Staatsorchester on 10 July and in August the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim will perform Con brio in their 2016 summer tour, including concerts at the Salzburg Festival, Lucerne Festival and BBC Proms.

• Jörg Widmann - profile


• Messe - workdetails

On 2 July, a production of Henze’s opera Elegy for Young Lovers will be staged by the Armel Opera Competition and the Liszt Academy in celebration of what would have been Henze’s 90th birthday on 1 July. The production will be directed by András Almási-Tóth with the Pannon Philharmonic conducted by Gergely Vajda at the Thália Theatre, Budapest.



Elegy for Young Lovers is set in an inn near the Austrian Alps where poet Gregor Mittenhofer has assembled a circle of loyal companions: his secretary countess Carolina, his physician Dr. Reischmann, his lover Elizabeth, and Hilda Mack who is haunted by the husband she last saw 40 years ago before he vanished in the mountains. Elisabeth falls in love with Toni Reischmann, the son of Mittenhofer’s doctor and although Mittenhofer agrees to let Elisabeth go, he begs her for one last labour of love: The young couple must bring him an Edelweiss from the mountains. Mittenhofer and the countess fail to warn Elizabeth and Toni that there is a snow storm approaching and soon after they set out into the mountains the storm comes. The young lovers both die, tightly embraced in each other’s arms.

Henze worked with two of his most admired American authors, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, to write the libretto. In his autobiography he writes about their collaboration:

I told them I wanted a small group of singers and a small instrumental ensemble comprising no more than twenty players. These instruments might perhaps play a role within the piece’s dramaturgical structure by being identified with particular characters. I told them that I would like the work to be a psychological drama, a chamber drama that would deal in the most general terms with questions of guilt and atonement, in other words, with subtle and complex issues. I was delighted with this draft and even while reading it could already hear the artificial air of the Hammerhorn buzzing in my ears. I could already hear the first notes of the music for the two lovers, delicate flowers, meadow saffron and violets, and the grotesque, Wotanesque huffing and puffing of Mittenhofer, the cold-hearted poet who offers up human sacrifices to his Muse. These people are real people, modern men and women, with their weaknesses and strengths, mortals, not gods or heroes or any other kind of supernatural beings. – Hans Werner Henze

Elegy for Young Lovers will also be staged in spring 2017 at the Theater an der Wien with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marc Albrecht. Further birthday performances include a concert of Henze’s chamber works to be performed in his home town, Gütersloh on 1 July, and the orchestral works L'usignolo dell'imperatore and Seconda sonata per archi in Montepulciano.

• Hans Werner Henze - profile


• Elegy for Young Lovers - workdetails

On 26 June, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ last large-scale work, The Hogboon, will be premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle, joined by the London Symphony Chorus, LSO Discovery Chorus and Guildhall School Musicians at the Barbican Hall, London. The work was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Philharmonie Luxembourg.



The Hogboon is a children’s opera which tells the story of Magnus, a young Orkney Islander who, with the help of a friendly Hogboon (a household troll), sets out to defend the village from the feared sea monster, Nuckleavee.

Completed shortly before his death in March,The Hogboon was particularly close to Maxwell Davies' heart as an Orkney resident and a passionate advocate for music education. The composer wrote the libretto himself, based on an Orkney folk tale. He took great pleasure in creating a work for combined professional and student forces, assigning the children’s choir the roles of the angry sea monster and the witch’s kittens. The opera also bears an ecological moral: we must take care of nature if we wish to live alongside it.

Bearing in mind the involvement of children and students, I have not written down to them with any condescension – rather – I have written up, knowing, from long experience, that, taken absolutely seriously, children and students are wickedly perceptive, and not to be taken for granted. I have attempted to make the masque work on several levels, of interest to adults, students and children, with weavings into the work’s verbal and musical textures diverse layers of meaning not least to do with our accommodations with Nature, and our present ecological problems.– Maxwell Davies

The Hogboon can next be seen in Luxembourg with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2017. Following the premiere of The Hogboon in London, a free memorial event in Maxwell Davies' honour will take place at St John's Smith Square on 27 June. Included in the programme are two of his last works, The Golden Solstice (2016) for choir and organ and String Quartet Movement 2016, receiving its premiere performance. For more information and booking go to: https://www.sjss.org.uk/events/max-celebration.

• Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - profile


• The Hogboon - workdetails


• Barbican Hall - information on the premiere The Hogboon


• St. John's Smith Square - information on the memorial event

On June 17, Cincinnati Opera presents the world premiere of Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers, with a libretto by Greg Pierce based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon. The world premiere production is directed by Kevin Newbury. Fellow Travelers was developed and co-commissioned by G. Sterling Zinsmeyer and Cincinnati Opera.



Fellow Travelers takes place at the height of the McCarthy era in 1950’s Washington, D.C. Recent college graduate Timothy Laughlin is eager to join the crusade against communism, and a chance encounter with handsome State Department official Hawkins Fuller leads to Tim’s first job—and his first love affair with a man. Drawn into a maelstrom of deceit, Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions and his forbidden love for Fuller.

The piece uses the love affair of Laughlin and Fuller to shed light on “the lavender scare”, an often-overlooked period of McCarthyism that resulted in the mass firings of suspected homosexuals from the United States government. “It’s about a part of our history which was almost invisible,” Spears says of Fellow Travelers, “and I think one of the things opera can do is make invisible things visible.”

The Aronoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio hosts ten performances running through July 10.

• Gregory Spears - profile


• Fellow Travelers - workdetails


• Cincinnati Arts Association - Informations to the performance

On 27 May, Hartmann’s Symphony No. 1 will be performed the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Kismara Pessatti under the direction of Arie van Beek in Rotterdam.

Hartmann composed his Symphony No. 1 for contralto and orchestra in 1935 but because of his political dissidence, the music was classified as degenerate. He would wait more than 10 years before the work was finally premiered in 1948. Today, Symphony No. 1 is a standard part of the new music repertoire. The work, subtitled “Versuch eines Requiems” (“Attempt at a Requiem”), was originally intended as a Cantata Lamento. By 1955, after many re-workings, the piece had matured into the symphony known today. The text is taken from poems by Walt Whitman, whose words also Paul Hindemith used in his Requiem 'for those we love'.

Symphony No. 1: music against the war

Hartmann's Symphony does not follow the classical form of four movements, but rather, five movements are structured concentrically around an instrumental middle movement (a "song without words"). This middle section contains a quotation from his anti-war opera, Simplicius Simplicissimus, in the form of theme and variation. Like many of his works, Hartmann's Symphony bears the impression of life under the Nazi regime.

He describes his motivation and feelings at the time of its composition:

Then there came 1933, with its misery and hopelessness, and with this that consistent development of violent dictatorship - the most dreadful of all crimes: the war. That year I recognised the necessity of confession, not in desperation and fear of that power, but as a counteraction to it. I told myself that freedom will win, even if we are destroyed – at least back then I believed this. At that time, I wrote my 1st String Quartet, the Poème Symphonique "Miserae" and my First Symphony with the words of Walt Whitman: 'I sit and look at all plagues of the world and at all distress and disgrace'. – Hartmann

Next month, Hartmann’s Concerto funebre for solo violin and orchestra will be performed on 4 June at the Wiener Festwochen Festival with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Klangforum Wien. On 4 and 5 July, it will also be performed by the Studio-Orchester München with conductor Christoph Adt at the Reaktorhalle in Munich.

• Karl Amadeus Hartmann - profile


• Symphony No. 1 - work details

On 22 May, Toshio Hosokawa’s one act opera, Hanjo, will open in a production by Florentine Klepper with the Berner Symphonieorchester and Kevin John Edusei at the Concert Theatre Bern. The work was commissioned for the festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2004 and has since been staged in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Japan.

Hanjo centres around the love story between a geisha girl Hanako and a young man called Yoshio who, forced to part with each other, exchange fans as a symbol that they would one day be together again. After Yoshio leaves, Hanako is bought by Jitsuko, a spinster. Hanako waits every day at the train station in hope that Yoshio might come to find her but as the newspapers begin to gossip about her strange behaviour, Jitsuko begins to worry that Yoshio will come to take her away. One day, Yoshio arrives at Jitsuko’s house with a fan but Hanako says the man before her is not Yoshio. Does she not recognise him? Or is she afraid to leave her life of endless waiting?

“Between dream and reality”

Hosokawa describes his opera as something between dream and reality: a development out of traditional Japanese Noh theatre in which ideas of fantasy and reality are explored.

"I wanted to illustrate with the music a drama that explores the boundaries between dream and reality, between insanity and reason. Sometimes that which exists only in the universe of dreams can be expressed more intensely through music than in theatre alone. I wanted to show the point of view of someone who sways between dream and reality. In the background the atmosphere in the orchestra changes gradually, like a picture on silk that one rolls out. The silence is woven slowly, but competently in the pattern of that silk roll, like a white dot in the middle of the picture." – Hosokawa

Hanjo will run from 22 May to 5 June in Bern. On 14 June, Ensemble Resonanz will give the world premiere of Sorrow River for recorder and strings alongside Voyage VII for trumpet and strings at the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg.

• Toshio Hosokawa - profile


• Hanjo - workdetails


• Konzert Theater Bern - informations about the performance

On 15 May, the world premiere staging of Peter Eötvös’ opera Senza sangue will open at Opéra d'Avignon in France conducted by Eötvös himself as part of Festival d’Avignon. Senza sangue was premiered in concert last year by the New York Philharmonic in Cologne.

Based on the novel of the same name by Alessandro Baricco, the opera is set during the Spanish Civil War. A young man and his comrades murder the family of a young girl, but when his eyes meet the young girl’s gaze, he decides to spare her life. The girl spends her life seeking revenge, killing the men who murdered her family one by one, except for the man who saved her. She longs for the gaze that changed her life so many years ago, in the hope that it might save her again.

Peter Eötvös on writing Senza sangue

“Senza sangueis my tenth opera. I have prepared myself like a film director, who wants to shoot his next film in black and white. In my earlier operas I wanted to show a colourful range of sounds; now I’m looking for sharp contrasts and shadings of black, grey and white. I based the orchestral score on sound collaboration, not on the independence of the different voices. Many instruments are playing the same melodies producing a powerful sound, similar to the Japanese calligraphy where with the stroke of a brush, one big line is made.” – Peter Eötvös

Senza sangue will be performed in new productions across 2016-17 including at Armel Opera and Hamburg State Opera, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra will give the UK concert premiere at the Barbican in 2017.

• Peter Eötvös - profile


• Senza sangue - workdetails

photo: Klaus Rudolph

 

On 3 May, Alexander Glazunov’s Cantata for mezzo soprano, tenor, mixed choir and orchestra will be performed by the Orchestra and Choir of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia under the direction of Juraj Valèuha at the Sala Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Also known as the ‘Memorial Cantata’, Cantata was premiered on 6 July 1899 in celebration of the centenary of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. The work is based upon text written by the Grand Duke Constantine Romanov, a lover of Russian art and a talented pianist, who also had a close friendship with Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky.

Cantata's Jubilant Character

Cantata consists of five movements, each with an air of ceremony: Chorus, Cradle Song, Chorus, Aria and Hymn. The jubilant character runs throughout the work building to the final hymn in which the soloists and choir come together for a brilliant finale.

This work is far more than just an occasional piece, it is full of warmly lyrical ideas, with Glazunov’s inspired flow of invention more than compensating for the doggerel poetry he was forced to set by the ‘unrefusable’ Grand Duke Constantine Romanov... This is one of those happy works, full of melody, that makes you feel glad to be alive. – Ivan March (Gramophone Magazine)

Later this month, Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar, revised by Glasunow and Nikolaj Rimskij-Korsakow, will be performed in concert on 8 May in the Metropolitan Theatre in Tokyo and the Berlin Philharmonic will perform Glasunov’s scoring of Alexander Borodin’s Fürst Igor at the Philharmonie on 25 May.

• Aleksandr Glasunow - profile


• Kantate - performance details 

photo: Orchestra and choir of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia

On 1 May, Paul Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler opens in a new production by Jochen Biganzoli at the Semperoper Dresden conducted by Simone Young, with Markus Marquardt in the title role.

The story of Mathis der Maler is based on the painter Mathis Grünewald, who served Cardinal Archibishop Albrecht of Brandenburg during the German Peasants' War (1524-25). The opera begins with Mathis meeting the peasant leader Schwalb and his daughter Regina, and helping them both to escape from the Federal Army. Mathis realises that his actions are in vain and is torn between pursuing his art and his duty. After the death of Schwalb, Mathis flees to the mountains with Regina, far away from political complications, but Albrecht orders him to return to his art and from this he creates his most famous work, the Isenheim Altarpiece. When Regina falls ill and dies, Mathis feels he has lost everyone close to him and despite Albrecht’s offer of work and stability, he withdraws with resignation into solitude.

Mathis der Maler and Paul Hindemith: An ideological drama

In many ways, the story of Mathis der Maler, for which Hindemith himself wrote the libretto, mirrored Hindemith's own experience during the rise of the Nazi party. The success of his earlier Symphony 'Mathis der Maler' provoked a massive propaganda campaign against Hindemith, preventing the premiere of the opera. After a failed attempt by Wilhelm Furtwägler to defend the composer, Hindemith left Germany in 1938 and emigrated to Switzerland, where Mathis der Maler was finally premiered in Zürich. One can imagine that the composer's own thoughts and emotions may have closely resembled to those of Mathis: a symbol of the suffering artist who wonders, torn between hope and desperation during times of conflict and change, whether his art still has a right to exist.

"Plagued by agonies of his disbelieving, seeking soul, Mathis experiences the beginning of a new era with the overthrow of the previous rulers. During this time he resisted the pressure of the state and the church but in his paintings he translates how this eventful period with all its misery, disease and war caused him much distress." –Hindemith

Mathis der Maler will run until 20 May at the Semperoper Dresden. Next season, the opera can be seen again at the Staatstheater Mainz.

• Paul Hindemith - profile


• Mathis der Maler - work details


• More videos and informations on the website of the Semperoper

photo: Frank Höhler

On 21 April a revival of the 2010 Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar production of Christian Jost’s opera Angst -Five gateways of a journey into the interior of angst, will open at the Staatstheater Darmstadt.

Scored for mixed choir and ensemble, the opera is based on the human experience of fear. Where does it come from? What are the reasons for it? Jost uses the many voices of the singers to embody these questions across five episodes titled ‘Fallen’, ‘Hölderlin’, ‘Kalt’, ‘Amok’ and ‘Ab’.

Angst was inspired by the experiences of English mountaineer Joe Simpson, who was the first person to climb the West Face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. On his descent, he broke his right leg in a zero visibility storm. His partner, Yates, used a rope to lower him down the mountain, but along the way he unknowingly lowered him over a cliff edge. After nearly an hour of holding him up he eventually had to cut the rope. Simpson survived the fall and against all odds, crawling back to the safety of their camp.

 

Christian Jost’s experience of fear

 

Jost’s work is not only informed by the story of these two mountaineers, but also by personal experience. He describes a crucial event in his life:

After I finished my opera Vipern, I had a physical collapse. In the middle of the night we had to call the ambulance, which brought me straight to the hospital where I lay for two hours while my wife was waiting. Of course she was afraid that she would never see me again, and I too was thinking this. But the emergency admission was so dismal that I decided: “Ok, you are at the end of your tether – but not here! You have to change quite a lot of things in your life, but this cannot be the end.” I wanted to show in Angst some of the sobriety I experienced in this moment. – Jost

Angst will run from 21 April to 18 June at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. Jost’s first opera Death Knocks can also be seen this month at the Staattheater Gießen on 23 April.

 

• Christian Jost - profile


• Angst - work details

 

photo: Maik Schuck - szene photo of the production at the German National theater in Weimar with the Opera Chorus of the DNT and State Orchestra Weimar, premiere: 24.09.2015 in the E-Werk (musical direction: Stefan Solyom, stage direction: Karsten Wiegand, stage designer: Bärbl Hohmann, costumes: Andrea Fisser, choir production: Markus Oppeneiger/Andreas Klippert)