09/10 Season

Bayer Arts & Culture sponsors young artists

First-class artists of international repute appear regularly as guests of Bayer Arts & Culture, and this will remain so in the future.

In addition, however, we have now initiated a carefully planned, long-term project to sponsor young people from the world of music, theatre, dance and art.

Since we aim to offer our audiences the greatest possible variety of top-class cultural events, this project will necessarily concentrate on potential “stars of tomorrow”.

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Through our stART project, which begins this season, we will sponsor highly talented artists and ensembles whom we believe to be poised on the threshold of an exceptional career. Gradually, all four sections of Bayer Arts & Culture will be integrated. As a rule, we will support our stART protégés for a period of up to three years.

The idea is to build up a relationship of trust that will inspire the young artists to look on Leverkusen as their cultural home. This new project is therefore necessarily a work in progress. And it is not just about fulfilling our own aims: We want to stimulate a genuine dialogue that will ideally open up new perspectives for both sides.

In the music section, we will welcome the Signum Quartet and the pianist Hardy Rittner to our stART community in 2009/10. The Signum Quartet will open our series of chamber music concerts dedicated to Joseph Haydn and the emergence of the string quartet, and we will also support the ensemble in the recording of its first CD featuring works by Ludwig Thuille (1861-1907).

Our second musical stART protégé is the pianist Hardy Rittner, whose two debut CDs of works by Johannes Brahms received highly enthusiastic reviews from the trade press. Hardy Rittner will be introduced to our audience as one of the soloists in our series of piano recitals. He has chosen an extremely interesting programme which he will perform partly on a historic and partly on a modern grand piano. His latest CD, featuring Arnold Schönberg’s entire works for piano, is being sponsored by Bayer Arts & Culture and will again be released on the prestigious Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm label.

In the theatre section, we have a medium-term cooperation agreement with the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, the leading acting school in Germany today. In line with this season’s theme The Arts and Power, Bayer Arts & Culture is initiating a project about the most celebrated actress of the Weimar Republic, Tilla Durieux, in collaboration with the Zagreb Puppet Theatre. Following the premiere in Leverkusen, the play will also be performed in Berlin as part of the Leverkusen/Berlin cultural axis.

Young graphic artists also deserve our support. In our occasional series An invitation to art colleges, art students are to be given the opportunity to present their current work outside of academy and studio walls where it can be viewed and discussed. They will also gain experience in organizing an exhibition. Our first guests will be the painting class of Ute Pleuger from the Burg Giebichenstein Academy of Art and Design in Halle.

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