Konzerthausorchester Berlin | Roland Kluttig

The Konzerthausorchester Berlin under the direction of Roland Kluttig will present an extremely interesting concert as part of MaerzMusik 2010 entitled “Utopia (lost)”. Alongside the remarkable orchestral work Arcana (1925/27, revised 1960) by Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), one of the greatest visionaries of modern music and Le Livre de Vie: Préface (1915–1926) by the Russian composer Nikolai Obuchow, there is also a chance to hear world premieres by hans w. koch and John McGuire.

Nikolai Obuchow (1892–1954) belonged to the avantgarde of the 1920s. Le Livre de Vie (The Book of Life), a utopian design for a Gesamtkunstwerk and at the same time liturgical ritual, became the focal point of his creative work. Over 800 densely-written pages inspired by the revelations of St. John, far exceeding Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium project, remained technically very challenging to stage and incomplete. An orchestrated version of the introduction was, however, premiered in 1926 by Koussevitzky and will be presented by the Konzerthausorchester at MaerzMusik.

hans w. koch composed a homage to the musical mystic Nikolai Obuchow with stele für n.o. (2010) using Obuchow’s idea of a twelve-tone music, which without repetition would offer over 200 million possible chords.

The works of the American avant-garde composer John McGuire, who studied during the 1960s in both California and Germany under Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, describe different aspects of a synthesis of minimalism and serialism. Marking Time (2009) divides the orchestra and lets it play antiphonically in different tempi. Dynamic climaxes within this interaction give the work its structural form and “mark time”. Both Marking Time and stele für n.o. are compositions commissioned by the Kunststiftung NRW.

19.00 hrs Werner-Otto-Saal | Introduction
Volker Straebel talks to mit hans w. koch and John McGuire