Name: Popular
Start: 2025-05-17T17:00:00
Location: Congress Centrum Suhl

Stephanie Childress

Anastasia Kobekina

MDR-Sinfonieorchester

It was his involvement with musical theater, music education, and his turn to historical music that led Carl Orff to his "archaic" compositional style. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he looked back and led the audience of Carmina Burana into a world of medieval songs from the 11th to 13th centuries, in which people were not afraid to attack the church and society and to praise sensual and depraved life. The evocative power of the rhythm in the music, the extraordinary use of instruments, and the declamatory vocal style have lost none of their gripping urgency to this day.

Carmina burana

Gewandhaus

Dmitri Kabalevsky was one of the politically inconspicuous, yet highly popular Soviet composers, as his first cello concerto exemplifies. Composed between 1948 and 1949, lyrical passages predominate, with flashes of Russian and Middle Eastern folk music. Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, on the other hand, is a work in which the composer struggles for his artistic and physical survival. After sharp party criticism of his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," the new symphony was intended to demonstrate his aesthetic pliability. Shostakovich achieved a brilliant balancing act: He composed an ostensibly "folk" work that, concealed behind artful compositional techniques, did not skimp on critical depictions of reality.