Bayerisches Staatsorchester

Dear Festival Visitor

For the past few months, we have cherished the hope that in March 2022 we would organise a live festival once again. Today this dream really has become reality. It is with enormous pleasure that we welcome you, our public, to Klarafestival once again, the biggest broadcast festival in the country. 

Enjoying music has always been a collective experience. We have all recently felt just how music today continues to fulfil this role in society. Concert halls are meeting places, collective listening posts where together we can celebrate, be amazed, make discoveries. Precisely that physical togetherness has inspired the motto for this edition: “Let’s stick together’.   

With no less than 25 concerts in Brussels, Antwerp and Bruges, we present an equally diverse programme this year. As always, we bring the music world’s absolute best to Flanders, like piano legend Maurizio Pollini, the Bavarian State Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Come and listen to musical monuments such as Bach’s St John Passion, Campra’s Requiem or Shostakovitch’s Seventh Symphony. But at Klarafestival you’ll just as well discover something new. Thus we have a youthful artistic team tackling Schnittke’s ballet Peer Gynt, director Luigi De Angelis takes on the music of Scarlatti, Pärt and Andriessen, and Les Tanneurs conjure up an artificial beach for the opera-performance Sun and Sea.  

The Bayerisches Staatsorchester led by Vladimir Jurowski is unquestionably one of the world's great orchestras. This evening, they perform several remarkable 20th century works, which have more in common than one imagines at first glance. Fearful of increasing jingoism, Britten spent several years in the United States, where he composed the enigmatic song cycle Les Illuminations, based on poems by the French symbolist writer Arthur Rimbaud. The wide range of colours Britten conjures from his pen in these songs are undoubtedly sublimely interpreted by the coloratura soprano Sabine Devieilhe. Britten returned to England a new man to become one of the greatest opera composers of his generation. From the successful opera Peter Grimes, he distilled the wonderful Four Sea Interludes. Britten shared an attraction to French symbolism with Debussy, whose opera Pelléas et Mélisande is a milestone in the history of music. In the orchestral suite created by Vladimir Jurowski, the opera (now without Maeterlinck’s symbolist theatre text) becomes all the more mysterious. 

The Bayerisches Staatsorchester concludes with music by Ravel, another French figurehead of the 20th century. La Valse is a nostalgic work in which Ravel, quite unabashed, has composed an ode to the flamboyant waltz music of Johann Strauss II and the former glory of the Viennese ballrooms.
 

Joost Fonteyne, 

Intendant Klarafestival

Britten on both sides of the water

Encroaching fascism, a hostile music press, his gay relationship with the tenor Peter Pears: Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) had reasons enough for fleeing England in 1939. Together with Pears, Britten set sail first for Canada and later New York, where he would remain for the next three years. During his time in America, he composed various large-scale orchestral works, including Les illuminations, op. 18. This song cycle in nine movements for soloist and string orchestra is a musical setting of poems from Arthur Rimbaud’s similarly titled collection of poems, Illuminations. According to Britten, Rimbaud’s title suggests “both the vision of a mystic and a brightly coloured picture”. That is also the way the composer set the parts to music: as brightly coloured miniatures with a voice that at times, so it seems, is seeking spiritual locations.

Britten has no need for a brass section to summon up the clamorous image of a fanfare. Strident violas proclaim together the beginning of Les illuminations, as if they were blaring trumpets. The opening section, ‘Fanfare’, is virtually all instrumental, except for one mysterious sentence: “J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone have the key to this savage parade”). In ‘Villes’ the orchestra depicts boisterous city life with musical industriousness. The third section has two segments: In ‘Phrase’ the fragile-sounding violins create a dreamlike, tranquil sphere, that shifts into the following ‘Antique’. A sensual voice and pulsating violins accompany Rimbaud’s homo-erotic poem about the heavenly body of “the graceful son of Pan”. Following the majestic and celebratory fourth section, ‘Royalty’, stormy sea and savage land reverberate in the stirring ‘Marine’. The seventh section, ‘Interlude’ creates a moment of reflection. While the strings brood over the meaning of all this, the protagonist recalls the key phrase with which the cycle began. The music moves again into the erotically tinged ‘Being beauteous’. Britten plays extensively with colours and textures that express the words of Rimbaud’s poetry, like the swirling snow in the violins or the contrast between foreboding “mort” and eagerly awaited “sourde”. In the eighth and penultimate movement, ‘Parade’, Rimbaud describes the enigmatic, wild procession of demons and ‘master-jugglers’ to which only he has the key. The cycle concludes with the poignant ‘Départ’,  in which the protagonist bids a resigned farewell. 

It was during his ‘American years’ that Britten’s status within the English musical tradition took increasing shape. When he returned to England in April 1942, he knew how he would distinguish himself. To his friend and fellow-composer Michael Tippett he let slip: “Perhaps I’m an anachronism. I’m [actually] an opera composer, and that’s what I’ll be, through and through”. He proved this with his first great success, Peter Grimes. The opera, completed in 1945, is based on a 19th century poem by George Crabbe and tells of the unlikable fisherman Peter Grimes, who is accused of the murder of one of his apprentices. Together with Pears and the librettist Montagu Slater, Britten worked on a version in which Peter Grimes is less clearly the monstrous, immoral villain. In their hands, Peter Grimes becomes an isolated and tragic figure, condemned and cast out by a rumour-mongering, intolerant society. The opera’s underlying message is, in the composer’s words, “the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the  individual”.

From the six musical interludes in the opera, Britten chose four to be published as an orchestral suite, the  Four Sea Interludes, op. 33a. ‘Dawn’ marks the transition from the prologue (in which Peter Grimes is questioned about the death of his apprentice) to the first act. Violins evoke thin rays of sunlight over the foreboding landscape, coloured by the low tones of the brass section. This is in great contrast with the exuberant ‘Sunday Morning’, in which glittering sunlight rhythmically reflects off the waves, and church bells ring out triumphantly. In the blazing morning sun, townsfolk gather around Peter Grimes’s hut, after the death of Grimes’s second apprentice. The interlude ‘Moonlight’ opens the third act, in which (now two days later) the body of Grimes’s second victim is discovered. Over the calmly pulsating waves, raindrops are falling. Britten closes his orchestral suite with the interlude ‘Storm’ from the first act, in which ear-splitting percussion and brass intone the turmoil raging both outside and within Peter Grimes’s heart.      

Debussy’s symbolist opera

Unlike Britten, Claude Debussy wrote only one opera. What the two composers did have in common was an affinity with French symbolism. While Britten sought inspiration in Rimbaud’s poetry, Debussy found his inspiration in symbolism’s standard bearer: the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. In the avant-gardist play Pelléas et Mélisande, Maeterlinck creates, with the age-old story of doomed love, a mysterious universe in which the characters use a mystical imagery full of symbols and metaphors.

Debussy had tried numerous times to write music for the theatre, but no text was appropriate for the musical experiment he envisioned. In an interview in 1889, he revealed his ideal opera: “Two associated dreams: that is the ideal. No time, no place. No great scene […] I dream of short verses, stirring scenes.” Debussy finally found the key for which he had been searching in Maeterlinck’s symbolist language. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) would become a milestone in the history of opera. The composer André Messiaen believed that “the depth of human emotions” and “the domain of the subconscious” had never been so captured in music. This evening, the conductor Vladimir Jurowski brings together a number of the instrumental episodes from the opera in a no less mysterious orchestral suite.
 

Ravel’s ode to Johann Strauss II

Already in 1906, Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) had conceived the plan to write an ode to the waltzing music of Johan Strauss II. “You know how much these wonderful rhythms attract me and how much I value the joie de vivre given voice in this dance”, wrote Ravel to a music critic about the Viennese waltz. The musical idea that he had worked on at intervals over the years was “a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, in my mind mixed with the idea of a fantastic, fatal swirl”. When in 1920 Sergei Diaghilev commissioned a ballet from the composer, Ravel’s idea seemed about to be realised. However, when Ravel played his composition on the piano for the first time, the Russian patron rejected the commission because, according to him, it wasn’t a ballet, but merely “a portrait of a ballet”.

La Valse therefore premiered not as a ballet, but as an orchestral work. Nevertheless, Ravel had his own visual image for his composition, which he expressed in a foreword to the score: “Through the whirling clouds we can vaguely discern waltzing couples. The clouds gradually disappear and one discovers […] an immense hall filled with a swirling crowd. The spectacle is gradually illuminated. Light bursts from the chandeliers […]. Situated in an imperial court, circa 1855.”

Vladimir Jurowski

The internationally acclaimed Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski has worked with renowned orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. He has held the position of First Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper in Berlin, musical director of the Glyndebourne Festival and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, where he was recently named Conductor Emeritus. He is Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and since 2021, he is the general music director of the Bayerische Staatsoper.

Sabine Devieilhe

The French soprano Sabine Devieilhe was hailed for her notable debuts at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2012 as Serpetta (La Finta giardiniera) and at Gyndebourne in 2015 as Fire/Princess/Nightingale (L’enfant et les sortilèges). Ever since, she has sung numerous roles for acclaimed opera houses such as the Queen of the Night (Die Zauberflöte), Euridice (Orfeo ed Euridice) and Mélisande (Pelléas et Mélisande). Recent highlights include her interpretation of Ophélie (Hamlet) at the Opéra Comique and of Morgana (Alcina) at the Opéra de Paris.

Bayerisches Staatsorchester

The Bayerisches Staatsorchester ranks among the greatest orchestras in the world. Among the many composers with whom the orchestra has been affiliated, it is perhaps Richard Wagner who is the most eminent, with the historical premieres of Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), Das Rheingold (1869) and Die Walküre (1870). Many of the most significant musical personalities of their time have fronted the orchestra as chief conductor, such as Richard Strauss, Hermann Levi, Kent Nagano and, since 2021, Vladimir Jurowski.

22:00 - 23:00

Klarafestival LOUNGE 

Join us in the Klarafestival LOUNGE for a drink and a chat.

Benjamin Britten, Les illuminations, op. 18

1. Fanfare

J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

[EN]

I alone hold the key to this savage parade.

2. Villes

Ce sont des villes! C'est un peuple pour qui se sont montés ces Alleghanys et ces Libans de rêve! Des chalets de cristal et de bois se meuvent sur des rails et des poulies invisibles. Les vieux cratères ceints de colosses et de palmiers de cuivre rugissent mélodieusement dans les feux…Des cortèges de Mabs en robes rousses, opalines, montent des ravines. Là-haut, les pieds dans la cascade et les ronces, les cerfs tettent Diane. Les Bacchantes des banlieues sanglotent et la lune brûle et hurle. Vénus entre dans les cavernes des forgerons et des ermites. Des groupes de beffrois chantent les idées des peuples. Des châteaux bâtis en os sort la musique inconnue…Le paradis des orages s'effondre…Les sauvages dansent sans cesse la fête de la nuit…

Quels bons bras, quelle belle heure me rendront cette région d'où viennent mes sommeils et mes moindres mouvements?

[EN]

Cities indeed! This is a people for whom those Alleghanies and Lebanons of dreams were staged! Chalets of crystal and wood move on invisible rails and pulleys. Old craters circled by colossi, and palm-trees of copper roaring melodiously in the flames… Processions of Mabs in russet, opaline robes ascend the ravines. Their feet in the waterfalls and briars, the deer suckle at Diana’s breast. The suburban Bacchantes sob, and the moon burns and howls. Venus enters the caves of smiths and hermits. Clusters of bell-towers sing the ideas of peoples. From castles built of bone an unknown music issues... The paradise of storms subsides... Savages ceaselessly dance the nocturnal feast…

What kind arms, what sweet hour will recover that region from which my slumbers and slightest movements come?

3a. Phrase

J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre; des chaînes d'or d'étoile à étoile, et je danse.

[EN]

I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.

3b. Antique

Gracieux fils de Pan! Autour de ton front couronné de fleurettes et de baies, tes yeux, des boules précieuses, remuent. Tachées de lies brunes, tes joues se creusent. Tes crocs luisent. Ta poitrine ressemble à une cithare, des tintements circulent dans tes bras blonds. Ton cœur bat dans ce ventre où dort le double sexe. Promène-toi, la nuit, en mouvant doucement cette cuisse, cette seconde cuisse et cette jambe de gauche.

[EN]

Graceful son of Pan! Round your brow crowned with flowers and berries, your eyes, precious spheres, move. Stained with brown lees, your cheeks are hollow. Your fangs glisten. Your breast is a cithara, chords chime in your pale arms. Your heart beats in that belly where a double sex sleeps. Walk, at night, gently moving that thigh, that other thigh and that left leg.

4. Royauté

Un beau matin, chez un peuple fort doux, un homme et une femme superbes criaient sur la place publique: "Mes amis, je veux qu'elle soit reine!" "Je veux être reine!" Elle riait et tremblait. Il parlait aux amis de révélation, d'épreuve terminée. Ils se pâmaient l'un contre l'autre.

En effet ils furent rois toute une matinée où les tentures carminées se relevèrent sur les maisons, et toute l'après-midi, où ils s'avancèrent du côté des jardins de palmes.

[EN]

One fine morning, among a very gentle people, a superb man and woman cried out in the public square: “Friends, I want her to be queen!” “I want to be queen!” She laughed and trembled. He talked to his friends of revelation, of trials undergone. They swooned against each other.

Indeed, they were kings the entire morning, while carmine hangings festooned the houses, and all afternoon, as they advanced towards the gardens of palm-trees.

5. Marine

Les chars d'argent et de cuivre—
Les proues d'acier et d'argent—
Battent l'écume,—
Soulèvent les souches des ronces.
Les courants de la lande,
Et les ornières immenses du reflux,
Filent circulairement vers l'est,
Vers les piliers de la forêt,
Vers les fûts de la jetée,
Dont l'angle est heurté par des tourbillons de lumière. 

[EN]

Chariots of copper and silver –
Prows of silver and steel
Plough the foam –
Root up the stumps of thorns.
The currents of the heath,
And the vast ruts of the ebb-tide,
Flow away in circles towards the east,
Towards the pillars of the forest,
Towards the posts of the jetty,
Whose angle is battered by whirlwinds of light.

6. Interlude

J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

[EN]

I alone hold the key to this savage parade.

7. Being Beauteous

Devant une neige un Être de Beauté de haute taille. Des sifflements de morts et des cercles de musique sourde font monter, s'élargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré: des blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes. Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se dégagent autour de la Vision, sur le chantier. Et les frissons s'élèvent et grondent, et la saveur forcenée de ces effets se chargeant avec les sifflements mortels et les rauques musiques que le monde, loin derrière nous, lance sur notre mère de beauté, —elle recule, elle se dresse. Oh! nos os sont revêtus d'un nouveau corps amoureux.

O la face cendrée, l'écusson de crin, les bras de cristal! Le canon sur lequel je dois m'abattre à travers la mêlée des arbres et de l'air léger!

[EN]

Against the snowfall, a tall Being of Beauty. Whistling of death and the circling of faint music make this adored body rise, expand and quiver like a spectre; wounds of scarlet and black burst from superb flesh. The colours proper to life deepen, dance and detach themselves around this Vision in the making. Shudders rise and groan and the frenetic flavour of these effects fills with that mortal whistling and raucous music that the world, far behind, hurls at our mother of beauty – she recoils, she rears. Oh, our bones are clothed with a new amorous body! 

Oh, the ashen face; the escutcheon of horsehair, the crystal arms! The cannon I must assault through the melee of trees and the weightless air!

8. Parade

Des drôles très solides. Plusieurs ont exploité vos mondes. Sans besoins, et peu pressés de mettre en œuvre leurs brillantes facultés et leur expérience de vos consciences. Quels hommes mûrs! Des yeux hébétés à la façon de la nuit d'été, rouges et noirs, tricolorés, d'acier piqué d'étoiles d'or; des facies déformés, plombés, blêmis, incendiés; des enrouements folâtres! La démarche cruelle des oripeaux! Il y a quelques jeunes…

O le plus violent Paradis de la grimace enragée!…Chinois, Hottentots, bohémiens, niais, hyènes, Molochs, vieilles démences, démons sinistres, ils mêlent les tours populaires, maternels, avec les poses et les tendresses bestiales. Ils interpréteraient des pièces nouvelles et des chansons "bonnes filles." Maîtres jongleurs, ils transforment le lieu et les personnes et usent de la comédie magnétique…

J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

[EN]

Sturdy enough jesters. Several have exploited your worlds. Devoid of need, in no hurry to make play of their brilliant faculties or their knowledge of your conscience. How ripe these men are! Eyes dazed like the midsummer night, red and black, tricolours, steel pricked with golden stars; features deformed, leaden, pallid, on fire; hoarse-throated frolickers! A cruel swagger of faded finery! Some are young…

Oh the most violent Paradise of a maddened grimace!... Chinese, Hottentots, bohemians, fools, hyenas, Molochs, old madnesses, sinister demons, mingling popular homely turns with bestial poses and caresses. They’re ready for new pieces and ‘sweet’ little songs. Master jugglers, they transform people and places and reveal magnetic stagecraft…

I alone hold the key to this savage parade.

9. Départ

Assez vu. La vision s'est rencontrée à tous les airs.
Assez eu. Rumeurs de villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.
Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. O Rumeurs et Visions!
Départ dans l'affections et le bruit neufs!

[EN]

Enough seen. The vision was encountered under all skies.
Enough had. Sounds of cities, evening, and in the light, and always.
Enough known. The decisions of life. – O Sounds and Visions!
Departure into new affection and noise!

BAYERISCHES STAATSORCHESTER

FIRST VIOLINS

David Schultheiß, concertmaster

Arben Spahiu, associate concertmaster

Meghan Nenniger

Cäcilie Sproß

Dorothea Ebert

Alexander Kostin

Rita Kunert

Verena-Maria Fitz

Ginshi Saito

Michele Torresetti

Felix Key Weber

Yon Joo Kang

Dania Lemp

Clara Scholtes

Paula Borggrefe

Julia Kühlmeyer

SECOND VIOLINS

Michael Arlt, principal

Hanna Asieieva, associate principal 

Daniela Huber

Sylvie Heymann-Seidel

Katrin Fechter

Traudi Pauer

Markus Kern

Immanuel Drißner

Isolde Lehrmann

Janis Olsson

Gyujeen Han

Bomi Song

Milos Stanojevic

Karol Strzelecki

VIOLAS

Dietrich Cramer, principal 

Clemens Gordon, associate principal 

Florian Ruf

Christiane Arnold

Tilo Widenmeyer

Johannes Zahlten

Anne Wenschkewitz

Ruth Elelna Schindel

Wiebke Heidemeier

David Ott

Clara Holdenried

Martha Theres Windhagauer

CELLOS

Emanuel Graf, principal 

Allan Bergius, associate principal 

Benedikt Don Strohmeier, associate principal 

Oliver Göske

Rupert Buchner

Roswitha Timm

Clemens Müllner

Darima Tcyrempilova

Johannes Välja

Theresa Strasser

BASSES

Florian Gmelin, principal 

Alexander Rilling, associate principal 

Thomas Jauch

Reinhard Schmid

Thorsten Lawrenz

Thomas Herbst

Wieland Bachmann

Vicente Salas Ramirez

Harfe Gael Gandino

Sophia Litzinger

FLUTES

Paolo Taballione, principal

Christoph Bachhuber, associate principal 

Lisa Batzer

OBOES

Frédéric Tardy, principal

Simone Preuin

Marlene Gomes

CLARINETS

Markus Schön, principal

Jürgen Key

Martina Beck-Stegemann (bass clarinet)

BASSOONS

Fagott Moritz Winker, principal 

Martynas Sedbaras, associate principal 

Gernot Friedrich (contrabassoon)

HORNS

Horn Johannes Dengler, principal

Eva Lilla Fröschl

Christian Loferer

Casey Rippon

TRUMPETS

Andreas Öttl, principal

Frank Bloedhorn

Balász Drahos 

TROMBONES

 Sven Strunkeit, principal 

Thomas Klotz

Matthias Kamleiter

BASS TUBA

Daniel Barth

TIMPANI

Pauke Pieter Roijen, principal

PERCUSSION

Thomas März

Claudio Estay

Carlos Vera Larrucea

Carlos Rubio

Godwin Schmid

Tomàs Toral Pons