“Essentially all thinking” consisted of “relating things to each other”, Arnold Schönberg once said. Conductor Vladimir Jurowski, born in Moscow, with Russian-Ukrainian roots, who emigrated to Berlin at the age of 18, has now curated and conducted a concert that is a “thinking” concert in this sense: it sets musical present and history in vibration, 1787 and 2023, but at the same time also feelings and thoughts, sounds and words. The main work of the evening is Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. But Haydn’s passion music isn’t performed as a complete whole. The seven movements are performed in alternation with six short orchestral pieces commissioned for this concert from composers based in countries where war or serious political crises are currently raging: Ukraine, Iran, but also Belarus and Russia. “Powerful, speaking music throughout” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
Jurowski conducts Stravinsky
This production illustrates Stravinsky’s opulent diversity of forms. Three of the works performed are longer, have larger casts – and yet could not be more different: With “The Flood”, “Renard” and “Les Noces”, Stravinsky presents himself as the chameleon he is often apostrophised as. The RSB (Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin) under its principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski welcomes seven soloists and the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin. The renowned German actor Stefan Kaminski hosts the evening. PROGRAM: “The Flood”; “Fanfare for a new theatre”, “Tilim Bom“, “Renard” Burleske in one act; Lullaby from “The Rake’s Progress”, “Four cat songs“; “Musick To Heare“ from Three Songs by William Shakespeare, “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”, “Les Noces“, 1919 version
War and Peace
This ‘War and Peace’ will go down as a milestone in Jurowski’s tenure at the State Opera, and in Tcherniakov’s often divisive career. They rise to meet the moment, overcoming the work’s near untenability not only to argue for its place in the canon, but also to use it as a vehicle for a passionate statement against Russian nationalism.” (The New York Times) Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace is one of the monumental works in opera history and rarely performed because of its sheer violence and complexity: More than 70 characters are cast for this four-hour opera, which is based on Tolstoy’s masterpiece. With the appropriate preparation time, the Bayerische Staatsoper, one of the world’s top opera houses, has taken on this major work under the baton of its general music director Vladimir Jurowski and staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov, one of the most celebrated directors and born and raised in Russia – at the same time an expert on the subject.
Salzburg Festival 2017: Wozzeck
With a triumphant staging of Berg’s monumental opera Wozzeck, universal artist William Kentridge, who already made headlines with his productions of The Nose and Lulu, makes his appearance at the Salzburg Festival. In a “breathtaking reassessment” (Financial Times), he puts Berg’s tragical portrait of a simple soldier harassed by a merciless society in an extraordinary, multilayered set design, in which various projections of movie scenes and drawings intertwine with the action on stage. “Mr. Kentridge has given Wozzeck his most elegant and powerful operatic treatment yet.” (New York Times)