© Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin, Illustration: Alexandra Klobouk
Stories in the Poster 2025
Paris Europe Edition
Paris is a legendary musical metropolis that continuously reinvents itself. The sound of Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique” continues to sparkle from the 19th century and the now classic works “La Mer” by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro” can be heard while from other periods modern and jazz compositions also put in appearances. Many of the concert programmes at Musikfest Berlin 2025 explore cultural links with France and there are guest performances by several orchestras and ensembles from the French capital including the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées with Collegium Vocale Gent, the original sound ensemble Les Siècles and the vocal ensemble Les Cris de Paris, making its debut at Musikfest Berlin with works from the Renaissance.
In this poster the Berlin-based illustrator Alexandra Klobouk has hidden images of 27 characters for you to find, each with close connections to the 2025 festival. They include historical figures but also composers, singers, instrumentalists and conductors from the present day.
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Beethoven and Berlioz in Paris
Paris in the early 19th century: the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven thrill a broad audience – thanks to François-Antoine Habeneck, a violinist, composer and conductor. It was he who founded the Societé des Concerts in 1828 and produced the French premieres of works including Beethoven’s 1st Symphony. Not only did he introduce Beethoven to a wider audience, he also conducted the world premiere of Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique”.
Hector Berlioz wrote a letter to his father in December 1828 about Beethoven’s music, which he would hear in a concert the next day and had moved him so much in rehearsal that he was afraid of the effect the concert might have. He wept to speak about it. “Ce n’est plus de la musique, c’est un art nouveau” – Beethoven’s compositions were no longer music at all, but a new art form.
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Anniversaries
This year Helmut Lachenmann will reach his 90th birthday and Musikfest Berlin honours his position as one of the most important composers of our time in a series of concerts. When Prince Charles, now King Charles III, met the inventor of musique concrète instrumentale and told him: “Mr Lachenmann, your music is too difficult to understand,” Lachenmann replied by quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “It may be madness, but there is method in it.”
Younghi Pagh-Paan was born in South Korea in 1945, in the year of the rooster, as the second youngest of eight children. In 1974 she received a DAAD scholarship to attend Freiburg University of Music and five years later she became the first woman in its history to be commissioned to write a large-scale orchestral work for the Donaueschinger Musiktage. While writing her first orchestral score in May 1980, she was overcome by shock at the news from her homeland. In the South Korean university city of Gwangju, protests against the military dictatorship had ended in the massacre with up to 2,000 people. “What can I do as a composer?” she asked herself. Her first orchestral work “Sori”, which means voice, sound, shout or scream, is one of the works to be performed in the concert by the Busan Philharmonic Orchestra.
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A la Recherche
IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique)
IRCAM opened in 1978 as part of the Centre Pompidou, a national centre for arts and culture. It was conceived by Pierre Boulez in response to a commission from George Pompidou, and Boulez would continue to run the institute until 1992. Its aim was to establish an independent research centre that was not reliant on TV or radio stations or industrial enterprises, a centre “not only for electroacoustics and acoustics, but for research into all aspects of music and acoustics.” (Boulez) Today it remains one of the leading international institutions for research into musical acoustics, electronic and digital music, where a host of composers including Lisa Streich, Francesca Verunelli, Olga Neuwirth, Kaija Saariaho, Georg Friedrich Haas and many others have already realised works.
It is a magnet for sonic artists and composers: the Paris-based Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), conceived by Pierre Boulez in response to a commission from the French President Georges Pompidou in 1970, which he ran until 1992. To honour Igor Stravinsky as a forerunner of modernism and liven up the rather dreary square outside IRCAM in Paris, Pierre Boulez commissioned the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely and his life partner the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle to design an extensive fountain. The 16 moving sculptures that spray water and are arranged across an enormous water basin each represent one of Stravinsky’s works.
Pierre Boulez’s significance for the history of music cannot be overestimated. In the 1950s, along with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, he was one of the founders of post-serialist music. As a composer, conductor and eloquent essayist, his influence on musical life soon spread well beyond France and was felt in the fields of teaching, organisation, musical policy and institutions. Pierre Boulez would have been 100 years old this year.
“One morning in November I was sitting by the Stravinsky Fountain outside IRCAM. The first frost had formed and these machines, these kinetic sculptures by Jean Tinguely, were ‘singing’ as they revolved. This was a fascinating moment for me. On one had the music was very beautiful, incredibly sonorous and gentle, something you would never expect from these black iron machines, on the other it could not be connected with a human being.” – Lisa Streich, 2025
Lisa Streich
© Ricordi/Harald-Hoffmann
Maurice Ravel was fascinated by the possibilities that the Industrial Age might generate for him. His music appeals primarily through overpowering sensory effects, unusually attractive harmonies and its exquisitely rich tonal colour. As a result, it is easy to forget that Ravel was also a master of musical construction, with the ability to develop his compositions from very few building blocks that would mesh like clockwork.
Another guest at IRCAM was the Italian composer Francesca Verunelli, who studied Computer Music there. She is particularly fascinated by the harmonic tunings that can be found in Renaissance madrigals. Why settle for 12 tones per octave when you can have 31? A question that was asked by the Renaissance composer Nicola Vicentino and repeated by Francesca Verunelli from a contemporary point of view.
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L’amour
Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian were the perfect couple of the post-war avantgarde. They had met as students in 1950: “He didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Italian. All we had was music.” Together they embarked on singing adventures that would inform numerous of Berio’s compositions. In her own composition “Stripsody”, the outstanding vocalist and composer Cathy Berberian brilliantly incorporated vocal fragments from the most disparate contexts, ranging from Beatles songs and cartoon sound effects to a cat miaowing. The couple conducted an intense artistic exchange about Joyce, Eco, Armenian and Sicilian folk songs – and were married for 11 years. Berio’s “Requies”, a composition filled with memories, is dedicated to Berberian, and in “Folk Songs” he reflects on their time together.
You can find more background information on the congenial collaboration between the two in an interview with Berberian and Berio’s daughter, Cristina Berio.
Where if not in Paris? It’s the city where Miles Davis made his best recordings, where the legendary French jazz and film composer Michel Legrand dreamed up his music and the actress and chansonnière Juliette Gréco set poems by Jean-Paul Sartre and other famous writers. They would meet in the nightclubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with their music becoming the soundtrack for existentialism and expressing an entire generation’s approach to life.
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Clouds and Waves
As a conductor, Oxford-born Daniel Harding will stand on the platform in front of 120 musicians, but he is also a pilot, regularly sitting in the cockpit of an Air France plane. How can he combine being a conductor and a pilot? In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Daniel Harding explained that his two jobs complement each other very well as the importance of responsibility whenever he is flying leaves him freer to try things out when making music and not to get stuck thinking about control.
“If you want to avoid disasters when you’re playing music, you will also avoid beauty. Flying corrects my perceptions of what can go truly and seriously wrong with music. In a concert, things go wrong when you fail to attempt anything. But if you try something and then reach the limits of what you can achieve, that is not a mistake in music. By contrast, flying always revolves around a precise understanding of risks and working out a strategy so that you never end up a situation that you can’t get out of safely.”
– Daniel Harding, 2025
Daniel Harding
© Musaccio / MUSA
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A home all over the world
Unsuk Chin is a Berliner with South Korean roots. In her music she creates a cosmos all her own and avoids being pigeon-holed in specific cultural categories. For the piece “Graffiti” she wandered through the streets and was inspired by modern palimpsests. “My music is an image of my dreams. I try to represent the visions of immense light and improbable glorious colour that I see in all my dreams as an interplay of light and colours that flow through the room and at the same time form a malleable sound sculpture whose beauty is very abstract and remote yet speaks directly to the emotions, communicating joy and warmth.”
– Unsuk Chin, 2003
Karina Canellakis is like a whirlwind standing in front of the top European and North American orchestras that have been eager to secure her services ever since Nikolaus Harnoncourt named her as one of his “successors”. Early in her career, while still a violinist, she encountered Sir Simon Rattle in Berlin, who encouraged her to conduct.
“I changed my everyday routine: I did more exercise, took care to eat better and generally look after myself – and above all I really took time to think about a piece of music, much more than when I was still a violinist. And I think that made me a better violinist too. I wish every musician would learn to conduct and put their instrument aside for a week to go to concerts and listen.” – Karina Canellakis, 2019
The Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has a particular affection for the music of the painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, whose works evoke unrivalled impressions of the Lithuanian landscape. In 2025 this enthusiastic populariser of music became the first woman to conduct a subscription concert with the Vienna Philharmonic after 165 years and she arrives in Berlin with wind in her sails.
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Epilogue
The Illustrator
The author, illustrator and visual storyteller Alexandra Klobouk is fond of lively and humorous images. Having transplanted the Philharmonie Berlin to New York’s Central Park for Musikfest Berlin’s poster in 2024, this year it is the turn of the musical city of Paris.
“Being able to immerse myself in something new” is something the Regensburg-born artist finds “incredibly exciting”. This enables her to approach subjects “from a different, undistorted perspective” and create illustrations that “connect the viewer with less familiar worlds.” – Alexandra Klobouk, 2025
Alexandra Klobouk © Berliner Festspiele, photo: Fabian Schellhorn
Copyright: © Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin, Illustration: Alexandra Klobouk