Contemporary music is allowed to groove and even put a smile on the listener’s face. So at the great concert of musica viva in the Herkulessaal with the BR Symphoniker under Johannes Kalitzki. Iannis Xenakis’ “Jalons” (1986) for 15 solo strings, woodwinds and brass is a kaleidoscope that one would look at again and again as a child, full of admiration for the many changes. Here there are always new constellations, color shades and rhythms of the instrument groups to be admired.
Milica Djordjević’s “Mit o ptici – Vogelmythos” tells the story of a bird created from sand and water that grows into a blood-covered giant that contains all the longings and passions of the man who fathered him but is not ready for the world. Slaying him doesn’t help, he keeps reincarnating himself until his maker realizes that with him he has to accept himself.
Djordjević tells this deep fable in four parts for choir and orchestra of the BR in a wonderfully vivid way, even if you don’t read the bilingual text in the program booklet. From the tender beginning, through a massive build-up that turns the bird into a monster, to the calm and peace at the end, you can follow almost every single moment of the story. Sometimes you just enjoy the colorful language setting, which the BR choir transports in a dreamlike, dazzling way.
The second world premiere was Nicolaus Richter de Vroe’s violin concerto, written between 2018 and 2020. Here, too, the astonishment is great: about the fine, dense hatching of the violin on the side of the Japanese mouth organ Sho and the glissandi of two double basses. In the middle of it all, suddenly, a kaleidoscope of quotations straight through the violin literature with Alban Berg in the centre, before at the end the first tutti violinist disappears backstage to the left and the soloist Ilya Gringolts, who is dueting with him, escapes to the back into the foyer. Like de Vroe, who is being released with this farewell gift as a violinist in the BR Symphony Orchestra.