The season opener is dedicated to natural phenomena: their effects on our world and its inhabitants are as fascinating as they are unpredictable. In collaboration with the Bern Music Festival, whose theme this year is "Lightning," the concert program will be performed as a guest concert in Bern on September 2nd. Two electrifying works will take center stage. One is James Dillon's "Lightning Strike" from the 1990s, a concerto for flute and orchestra. Following "Crossing" and "Bright Night," it is the concluding work of his "German Triptych"—in which the Scottish composer set to music the idea of ​​enlightenment emerging from darkness.

Tears of Nature Dillon, Šenk, Tan

Kulturzentrum Reitschule

In "Elements," Nina Šenk explores the balance between our everyday lives and elemental nature, each embodied by different groups of instruments. Benjamin Britten began work on his Violin Concerto in 1938, bringing the unfinished score with him when he emigrated to New York by ship with his partner, Peter Pears. The shock of two wars, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, found its way into the work, as did the American popular music that Britten encountered during his stay in the USA. Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra was also written in exile, commissioned by the conductor Sergei Koussevitzky and his Boston Symphony Orchestra. Dietmar Holland described this last major orchestral work by Bartók, who, while seriously ill and almost penniless, had to wrest it from himself as a response to the horrors of the Second World War, as a "utopia of brotherhood between nations."

7th Symphony Concert

Eurogress Aachen

New Music Ensemble

Music Building and Recital Hall

The superduo Simon Crawford-Phillips and Malin Broman offer a full evening in the spirit of Swedish music. There will be a world premiere of Benjamin Staern's The Eternal, followed by solo juggling in Daniel Börtz's Double Concerto for One. It all lands softly in Mozart's lovely Thirty-ninth Symphony.

Börtz and Mozart

Norrlandsoperan

simmering sensation lingers beneath the surface: In "Shadows of Stillness," Nina Šenk captures the anxiety of the standstill during the first weeks of the coronavirus lockdown. A touch of escapism hangs over Richard Strauss's oboe concerto:its idyllic tone and transparent texture give little clue to the circumstances under which the work was created. It was the first multi-movement orchestral work written by Strauss, then already 81 years old, after the end of the Second World War, a "great, yet unemotional swan song for a destroyed musical language" (Reinhard Schulz). With the peppery third movement, "Furiant," Antonín Dvořák gave his Symphony No. 6 a distinctly Bohemian character—at the same time, many details reveal a close influence from Dvořák's friend and patron, Johannes Brahms. This symphony brought him worldwide fame.

3rd Symphony Concert

an orchestral "breathing in and out" (Šenk). Camille Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 5 was composed in 1896 in Luxor, Egypt. The composer himself described the middle movement as "a kind of journey to the Orient." In addition to Arabic melodies recorded several years earlier, it contains "a Nubian love song that I heard boatmen sing on the Nile." Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov also paints pictures of an imaginary Orient in his "Scheherazade" from 1888. The eponymous princess tells adventurous stories for a thousand and one nights, for her survival is at stake – and Rimsky-Korsakov dresses these stories in beguiling orchestral palette.

1st Symphony Concert

Nina Šenk, laureate of the Erste Bank Composition Award 2024, is considered a key representative of Slovenia's up-and-coming international music scene. In her works, the 1982 born composer expands the possibilities of different soundscapes, questions the traditional structures of sound formations and creates a variety of harmonic timbres.

Following the world premiere of her opera Canvas as part of the Johann Joseph Fux Competition for Opera Composition 2023, Klangforum Wien is now collaborating with Nina Šenk again and will premiere her award winning piece November Night (2024) at Wien Modern 2024 on 21 November 2024 as part of the Erste Bank Composition Award, which is being presented for the 35th time this year.

Nina Šenk

Events

Past events

Sep 2, 2026

Tears of Nature Dillon, Šenk, Tan · Basel Sinfonietta

30 - 31 May, 2026

7th Symphony Concert · Sinfonieorchester Aachen

About

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