September 2024
We're happy to be back at Musikfest Berlin - and very glad to take part of our Berlin program on tour to Grafenegg, Verona and Lucerne afterwards!
American composer Charles Ives (1874 - 1954), who more than anybody else personified a new, American approach to "classical" music in his time, would have celebrated his 150th birthday this year. The Musikfest 2024 edition therefore focuses very much on the broad, varied oeuvre of this composer, which encompasses symphonic works as well as chamber music and numerous songs for solo voice.
The MCO's own Musikfest concert this year centers around a selection of these songs in an arrangement for soprano and orchestra by Eberhard Kloke. On this occasion, we will share the stage with Anna Prohaska, a dear partner and long-standing specialist in 20th-century song and opera, with whom we premiered George Benjamin's latest opera Picture a Day like this at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in the summer of 2023.
When Charles Ives started his formal composition studies at Yale University, Czech composer Antonín Dvořák had just taken over, for three years, the position as director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. While many of Ives' compositions only found their way into American Concert Halls later in the 20th century, Dvořák's premiere of his Symphony from the New World at Carnegie Hall in 1893 was an immediate success. We are very happy to share with you these two very different, but equally fascinating perspectives on "American" music.
Yet another light on the Ives songs will be shed by Gustav Mahler's Seven Early Songs, also in a transcription for soprano and orchestra by Eberhard Kloke. And in Grafenegg only, young Israeli pianist (and winner of the Prix Serdang 2023) Ariel Lanyi will join us with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23.
On the conductor's podium for all four concerts of this tour, in Berlin, Grafenegg, Verona, and Lucerne: Antonella Manacorda, founding member and founding concertmaster of the MCO, with whom we share fond memories of many concerts together.
photo: (c) Pixabay
