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Programme

Olivier Messiaen
›Le tombeau resplendissant‹

Alban Berg
Violin Concerto ›Dem Andenken eines Engels‹

Ondřej Adámek
›Shiny or Shy‹ for orchestra

Alexander Skrjabin
›Le Poème de l'extase‹

Artists

Robin Ticciati Conductor

  • Veronika Eberle Violin

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

Afternoon Lectures

4–7 p.m., Curt Sachs Hall in the Musical Instrument Museum 

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Prof. Dr. Eckart Altenmüller 'Listening and making music as a networking art'
Prof. Dr. med. André Lee 'Chronic pain when making music'
Dr. Daniel S. Scholz 'Fear when making music: Causes and effects''

Admission free, registration at the visitor service

About the concert

“Healing” is never needed so badly and yet seems so difficult to achieve as when losing a loved one. In any case, it is definitely inconceivable without a consciously experienced process of mourning. Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto, which of all compositions written in twelve-tone music has perhaps the most harrowing and immediate effect on the audience, as a kind of requiem for Manon Gropius, who died at the age of only 18 years. The grace and kindness that the daughter of Alma-Mahler Werfel and Walter Gropius radiated is recalled in the first section of the work, and also the struggle with death is described in the further course, before the solo violin ascends to spherical heights with the last notes. Both in the distorted form and in the original harmonisation, Berg incorporates the Bach chorale ‘Es ist genug’ (‘It is enough’), the beginning of which is identical to the last four notes of the twelve-tone row.

The religious dimension hinted at here dominates the opening piece of the third festival evening: Olivier Messiaen’s first major orchestral work ‘Le tombeau resplendissant’ (roughly translated as ‘The Shining Tomb’) sets the stage for the glaring hymnody for which this composer is known as well as for moments that seem to tell of the rebelliousness of youth. After Ondřej Adámek’s work ‘Shiny or Shy’, inspired by Balinese gamelan music, the programme concludes with Alexander Scriabin’s ‘Le poème de l’extase’ (‘The Poem of Ecstasy’). Especially in his piano music, the Russian composer was a master of the most delicate tones of the soul, yet on the other hand his sense of mission in the last years of his life could border on megalomania: Scriabin, who, like Alban Berg, died of blood poisoning at a relatively young age, believed he was making a considerable contribution to the healing of the whole world with his music. It was probably this self-perception that allowed him to compose such extravagant, grandiose and, in his own words, “orgiastic” music as can be heard in ‘The Poem of Ecstasy’. The densely woven structure of eleven different motifs – the trumpet intones what is called the “theme of self-assertion” – culminates in an overwhelming unleashing of sound.

The evening’s soloist is renowned violinist Veronika Eberle. In 2017, her interpretation of Berg’s Violin Concerto as an epilogue to Christoph Marthaler’s production of ‘Lulu’ at the Hamburg State Opera left an unforgettable impression.

Cover des Programmheftes
Programme brochure

for the concert

Download PDF

Artists

Biography
Robin Ticciati

Robin Ticciati

Conductor

Biography

Veronika Eberle

Veronika Eberle

Violin

Biography
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

Orchestra

Biography