Karajan-Akademie der Berliner Philharmoniker

Anyone interested in finding out what the Berliner Philharmoniker will sound like tomorrow and in the future should hear and experience the Karajan Academy. Around a third of today’s Philharmoniker musicians have emerged from the Academy, which Herbert von Karajan founded in the early 1970s. The extraterrestrial program of the scholarship recipients, however, already suggests a flight of fancy. Under the direction of the conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher, their eyes are set on the heavens. The Italian composer Clara Iannotta, who was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Composers’ Prize, makes her debut at the Musikfest Berlin and invites the ensemble to dream of resurrection with “Intent on Resurrection – Spring or Some Suich Thing”.

The 26-year-old Simon Höfele is the shooting star of the trumpet scene, leading the critic Eleonore Büning to marvel: “Such a firework of the unheard-of! Such a wealth of rhythms, timbres, voices, vocals!” At the Musikfest Berlin, he is a guest soloist launching Matthias Pintscher’s “celestial object” into orbit at the Berlin Philharmonie.

The dream of celestial music fires the imagination and is probably as old as the art of sound itself. “I feel air from another planet” – this line of poetry guided Arnold Schoenberg as he liberated himself and his music from the pathos of rigid conventions. His “First Chamber Symphony” symbolizes this new beginning and, at the same time, the dream of transcending earthly gravity.