During carnival, things are turned upside down, even at a venerable institute like the Munich University of Music. This includes the fact that their concert format with the greatest broad impact is one in which young people do everything that they are never allowed to do in normal university concerts: use instruments the wrong way around, for example, or comment satirically on socio-political developments. This year too, the responsible student representatives are expecting 2,500 visitors, and like every year, all performances are already sold out.
Georg Blüml has played a key role in this success for more than twenty years, initially the format’s presenter since 2002 and its director since 2006. The Munich theater maker has professionalized the carnival concert, from the modifications to the lighting and video feeds to the use of snow cannons. And this led the university management to increase the number of concerts from initially one (plus a dress rehearsal) to now five.
Jew’s harps and flying frogs
Nevertheless, the 2024 carnival concert will now be his last. He accompanied it, “from the chaotic beginnings to the successful format through the crisis of the Corona years, the years of social division,” says Blüml in an interview with the SZ. “It’s going well, and why not stop at the climax?” It fits with the non-hierarchical development of the programs, in which the students themselves provide most of the suggestions for their numbers. Blüml sees his task as more of checking them for their stage effectiveness, combining several into blocks and “looping in a common thread.” To this day, what appeals to him about working with young people is “the incredible passion, the enthusiasm, the creative wildness”: “When you work with so-called professionals, everything is within the confines of the art industry.”
There was never a lack of anarchism at the carnival concert at the music college.
(Photo: HMTM)
Despite all the professionalism, the carnival concert was never lacking in anarchism. Blüml – and certainly the fans too – will remember some legendary scenes from the performance of a Jew’s harp concert by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger with flying frogs to the destruction of a car on stage. Blüml cannot completely rule out the possibility that he will return as a guest director at some point. But: “After twenty years you have to let the children fledge at some point.”
Saturday to Tuesday, February 10th to 13th, 7:19 p.m.; Sunday, February 11th, also 11:11 a.m.; Munich University of Music and Theater, Large Concert Hall, Arcisstraße 12