2009/10 Season

Music section

Our theme for this season – The Arts and Power – was inspired by the Mendelssohn anniversary year in 2009. The photo on page 12 shows the inauguration in Leipzig on November 4, 1947 of the Mendelssohn memorial built to replace the one destroyed by the National Socialists.

Carolin Sturm
Music section

It is impossible to study the life and work of Mendelssohn today without reflecting on his reception during the National Socialist era: The complete œuvre of this outstanding composer was banned by totalitarian despots, and oft-played masterpieces vanished from the concert stage. For this reason, many of Mendelssohn’s magnificent scores are now virtually unknown. As his anniversary year draws to a close, we pay tribute to this great Romantic composer in our symphony concerts and piano recitals – which include some rarely heard works – and with a performance of Elijah by top-class singers and musicians.

Through the ages, composers have been persecuted or manipulated by their countries’ rulers. Some have had their work either exploited for propaganda purposes or banned altogether, while others have protested against oppression through their music. This is the theme at the official opening of the season, when we will hear exemplary works by Boris Blacher, Silvestre Revueltas and Dmitri Shostakovich, and also throughout the season in various symphony concerts and piano recitals. In addition to Mendelssohn, our programme includes, for example, works by Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Viktor Ullmann, Rodion Shchedrin, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Hans Werner Henze, John Adams and Béla Bartók, whose desperately sad op. 17, written during the First World War, can be heard in our string quartet cycle.

However, it is not just the content that we believe makes our programme particularly appealing, but also the musicians themselves. Our piano recitals – which as always will be held both in Leverkusen and in the historic town hall in Wuppertal – feature such outstanding performers as Olga Kern, Nikolai Tokarev, Evgeni Koroliov, Olli Mustonen, the duo Grau | Schumacher, 17-year-old Kit Armstrong and our stART protégé Hardy Rittner.

The symphony concerts, too, promise to be a real treat for our audiences. For the first time in the history of Bayer Arts & Culture, all the orchestras are from North Rhine-Westphalia, each led by its principal conductor. We have also succeeded in engaging some outstanding soloists. And what makes the cycle particularly remarkable is the fact that nearly all the concerts relate to the theme of the season.

Inauguration of the Mendelssohn memorial in Leipzig on November 4, 1947.

Zoom image

Inauguration of the Mendelssohn memorial in Leipzig on November 4, 1947.

This being Haydn year, we are devoting our chamber concert series to the string quartet, of which Haydn was the real father, and the emergence of this genre in the course of the 18th century. At our instigation, six renowned ensembles will juxtapose Haydn quartets with works by his contemporaries Placidus von Camerloher, Roman Hoffstetter, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Luigi Boccherini and Franz Xaver Dušek, and trace the development of the genre through their immediate successors in the Classical and Romantic periods right up to the present day. We are especially pleased that this series of concerts will be opened by the Signum Quartet, which we are sponsoring under our stART project.

We are striking out in a totally new direction with our interesting and varied offer for children and young people (now known as –8+x and –16+x respectively). Shortly before the start of the FIFA World Cup, for example, there will be a children’s concert entitled, by analogy with a German football cliché, The Note Is Round And A Concert Lasts 90 Minutes, in which the Bayer Philharmonic Orchestra, Bayer 04 football club’s under-10 team, cheerleaders and the Kontra-Punkt theatre company will take part. And a percussion workshop will be held as an introduction to the Wadokyo concert with Japanese drummers.

Another new feature of our programme are the Jazz in the Kulisse Sunday morning concerts with brunch and children’s activities in Kulisse, our theatre bistro. Why not come along?!

And last but not least there is our Bayer Philharmonic Orchestra, as always under the baton of Rainer Koch. They are one of the pillars of our programme, performing on four occasions: the tribute to Robert Schumann in our symphony concert series, the charity concert under the patronage of Werner Wenning, Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer AG, with the winners of the music competition organized by the Cultural Committee of German Business, the traditional concert held on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and the children’s concert mentioned above.

to the progamme