SWR Sinfonieorchester, Sylvain Cambreling

Like the string quartet, also the institution of the full symphonic orchestra has never lost its appeal. To this day, its instrumental potential and foremost its exploration of sound and space as well as its expressive potential are being permanently re-examined and re-invented. Ever since its foundation, MaerzMusik has paid due attention to this genre and presented a notable number of great orchestral works by established composers as well as by young talents in Berlin: Hivers – Winter by Hugues Dufourt in 2002, illuminarea by Makiko Nishikaze and Eberhard Großkopf’s Plejaden in 2003, works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Tristan Murail in 2004, and, in the thematic context of Ives & Consequences, Ives’ monumental 4th Symphony, complemented by orchestral works by Petr Kotik, Olga Neuwirth, Phil Niblock and Christian Wolff. Last year’s highlight was set the by performance of Dieter Schnebel’s Sinfonie X on occasion of the composer’s 75th birthday.

This year, the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg under the baton of Sylvain Cambreling will again present three works that – however different their creators – all centre around the possible merging of and interdependency between structure/time and sound/expression. Oliver Messiaen has been instructor to different generations of composers, like composers of New Music after 1945 or the spectralists from the 1968s generation. His work Chronochromie (1959/60) is a monumental piece in which he relentlessly links the production of sound and timbre to the structuring of duration/time. It will be preceded by the first performance of a revised version of Poussa by Lithuanian composer and conductor Vykintas Baltakas, whose Sinfonia was presented at MaerzMusik 2003. The concluding piece will be Schreiben by Helmut Lachenmann (2003/2004), a work focusing on the phenomenon of writing: as a codification of expression in musical notation, as physical acts transferred to the producing of instrumental sounds, as an inscribing of sound in its physical and semantic qualities into the perception of the audience.