How good that there is the New Munich Philharmonic. That’s what anyone who walks past the stage entrance to the Loisachhalle shortly before the concert begins and sees a group of young people conversing in all sorts of languages thinks so. Time and time again, music students and young professional musicians meet here to make music at the highest level, but also to live intercultural exchange. They come from all over Europe and demonstrate how effortlessly an exchange across languages and countries can work if everyone works towards one goal: (musical) understanding.
This is all the more remarkable as the demanding program does not contain a piece that is more than a hundred years old, but demands an immense range of expression. A veritable melting pot of musical styles is the commissioned composition by the young Australian Samuel Penderbayne, who was successful in Berlin in 2019 with his children’s opera “Die Schneekönigin”. His three-movement work “The Third Room” can now experience its world premiere in Wolfratshausen. Hardly any other orchestra would be better suited for this than the young Neue Philharmonie. Sometimes the ensemble under Ekhart Wycik acts as an accomplished new music ensemble, sometimes as a big band, sometimes as if it were about contributing the soundtrack to the next blockbuster.
“The Third Room” is the name of the three-movement work by the Australian Samuel Penderbayne, which was premiered in Wolfratshausen in the presence of the composer.
(Photo: Hartmut Pöstges)
“That’s what it’s all about – bringing different genres of music together,” says Penderbayne, who borrowed the concept of third space from postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha. In any case, he doesn’t have the avant-garde fear of catchy melodies. Some of the episodes presented with a large orchestral effect (only three drummers are well occupied here) are irritatingly beautiful. Only occasionally are they commented on sarcastically, with a xylophone interjection or a clarinet gesture, as if to say: “You don’t have to take it too seriously”. What matters more is the dynamic of the whole, the opening of that third space, which becomes the point where cultural and stylistic boundaries blur, threatening cluster chords reconcile with jazz harmonies. The Neue Philharmonie acts here with visible fun, without giving up the precision necessary for all rock and hip-hop freedom.
You don’t risk much with the assumption that Francis Poulenc would have enjoyed such an E and U musical hybrid. His concerto for two pianos itself quotes old formal elements and, in the slow movement, Mozart lyricisms. The rest is witty wit, Parisian variety show charm and original harmony. Anna Buchberger and Henriette Zahn are the soloists in this sparkling musical experiment. They act according to the maxim that jokes work best when told in a neutral manner. They work through the mechanistically tackling chain of sixteenths in a correspondingly dry manner, in order to be able to glitter effectively in the high register. The slow movement sounds with cool passion and thus achieves the most beautiful expression. Buchberger and Zahn create glass flowers. These are cleared away with the fast-paced finale, but none of the manic tone repetitions are lost. That calls for an encore. And yes, the duo says goodbye to long applause with an intimately performed Andante from Mozart’s Sonata for Piano Four Hands (KV 381).
After these pieces full of anarchic fun and subtle esprit, the following work requires an introduction. Ekhart Wycik sums it up succinctly: “Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is oppressively topical. The piece was written at the height of Stalinist repression and is therefore also an important document of the time. It’s about nothing less than the individual who is led by an overpowering state apparatus being suppressed again and again.” The concert of the New Philharmonic in Wolfratshausen, like the subsequent ones in Fürstenfeldbruck and Munich, is therefore dedicated to the victims of the cruel war with which the Putin regime is sweeping Ukraine. Against this background, the orchestra plays all the more passionately. A gloomy world of sound forms in the first movement, which is suddenly interrupted by a banal march, a symbol for the senseless military parades with which autocratic rulers like to celebrate themselves. This brute force continues in the following Allegretto, only momentarily interrupted by a delicately intoned trio. But the center of the work is undoubtedly the slow movement, an island of humanity colored with existential sadness. Sluggishly moving forward, the orchestra surpasses itself. In perfectly balanced chords that relate to one another with tension, a rare tragedy emerges here, which the noisy compulsory euphoria of the finale only makes appear to dispel.
Silence follows the booming final chord. “Music doesn’t change the world. But music changes people and they change the world. War and oppression will not win.” Ekhart Wycik’s words resonate in these moments. He might be right. After such a concert, this hope stays awake. That’s not a little.