Le mystère des voix bulgares: this was the name of a legendary record (or rather a series of records) that electrified music fans all over the world: rough, rubbing, flattering, incredibly rhythmic choral sounds that had never been heard before! Or had they? Béla Bartók, the great Hungarian folk music researcher, had already poured them into his string quartet in the 1930s, and Bulgarian ensembles and choirs had never stopped cultivating the country’s musical traditions. East and West, church sounds and fast-paced village bands meet here. The quartet around our violinist with Bulgarian roots, Maria Geißler, embarks on a virtuoso and sensuous search for traces.

Bulgarische Stimmen

Beethoven-Haus Bonn

This year’s Hofkapellen season does not begin as usual with an » unearthed « piece that has been lying dormant in an archive for 200 years and needs to be kissed awake by our musicians. But it starts with music that was played in Bonn: music from two of the most important musical families of the 18th century. When the thunderbolt boy Wolfgang Amadeus stopped off in London at the age of eight, the Mozart family befriended the youngest son of the famous St Thomas-Kantor: Johann Christian Bach was an elegant figure, a bon vivant and composer in the gallant style. But he was not the only influence on the travelling child prodigy. His eldest brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach – a very contrasting, rather austere figure – was later even described by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as his » musical father «. The programme includes a festive symphony by Johann Christian Bach, a stormy cello concerto by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and – as a symphonic coupling – a four-movement version of Mozart’s magnificent Posthorn Serenade. But Johann Sebastian Bach, who is at the centre of the Bach family for us today, should not be missing from this concert: If there is enough applause, the audience will experience in the encore which lines of music by Papa Bach were found on the back of a sketch by the teenager Ludwig van B. … Music that was most likely performed in Bonn at the time – at one of the leading musical courts in Europe!

Mozart und die Bäche

Kurhaus Bad Honnef

The Redoubt

In January 1941, 40,000 French prisoners lived in the STALAG VIIIA camp in Görlitz, among them the composer Olivier Messiaen. He finished his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps there under almost unimaginable conditions and performed it for the first time with three other fellow prisoners. »The audience was a very diverse mix of all walks of life – rural workers, auxiliaries, intellectuals, professional soldiers, doctors and clergy. “Never again have they listened to me with such attention and understanding as they did then,” the composer later recalled. As it says in a documentary by ARTE: »The first performance was attended by about 400 listeners. Starving, freezing people, far from their homeland – in the Silesian no man's land fascinated by this so strange, crystalline, transcendent music.« There are some chamber music works of the twentieth century for which you don't have to be a specialist in new music to be deeply touched by them. They push the doors to other dimensions wide open, lead us into other spheres of consciousness. This includes Messiaen's spiritual Quatuor pour la fin du temps , but it also includes Bartók's magnificent Trio Contrasts , written just over a year before Messiaen's quartet. How Bartók translates the old Hungarian verbunkos dance into the tonal language of the 20th century, how he fuses elements of jazz and new music, how he assigns instruments their own contrasting roles – this is still new, exciting, moving today. The great jazz clarinetist had commissioned the work from Béla Bartók shortly before his emigration to America. Two works by exiles, prisoners, which still grip us today as if they were written only yesterday – in a way that only great chamber music can! In between, the piano trio by Leonard Bernstein, the composer of West Side Story , written a year earlier than Bartók's Contrasts: a youthful work, a wild and yet compelling mix in which Bernstein takes us on a trip through counterpoint and atonality, through Gypsy style and jazz, through zones of calm and breathless chase.

Se-Eun Hyun

Events

Past events

Apr 28, 2025

Bulgarische Stimmen · Beethoven Orchester Bonn

Sep 8, 2024

Mozart und die Bäche · Beethoven Orchester Bonn

Future and recently performed repertoire

Cello in String Quartet No. 5 by Bartók

Beethoven Orchester Bonn

Cello in Piano Trio by Bernstein

Beethoven Orchester Bonn

Cello in Concerto for violoncello by Bach

Beethoven Orchester Bonn

Cello in String Quartet No. 1 by Hadjiev

Beethoven Orchester Bonn

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