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Enthusiastic reception for Bayer Arts & Culture in Leverkusen and Berlin
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| Michael Schade | Head of Corporate Communications Bayer AG |
Our long-term support for highly talented young artistes through the stART project has been equally successful. We remember with great pleasure the success of Orpheus in the Underworld in cooperation with the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (the first operatic production staged by Bayer Arts & Culture), the extremely powerful premiere of Rainer Maria Rilke’s dramatic poem The White Princess performed at the suggestion of the Signum Quartet, the presentation of the Benjamin Schaefer Trio’s CD, which received much acclaim in the jazz world, as part of our new jazz series at midnight, and the world premiere of Johannes Brahms’ first piano concerto on historical instruments with two-time ECHO prize-winner Hardy Rittner and the l’arte del mondo orchestra.
l’arte del mondo, a relatively new ensemble conducted by Werner Ehrhardt, was given an enthusiastic reception by audiences at the festive opening of last year’s season in the chamber music series with Daniel Hope and, above all, in the new series of unknown operas from the Mozart era instigated by Bayer Arts & Culture. The interest shown by the WDR broadcasting station and a well-known international classical music label like Sony testify to the innovative nature of this idea. Over the next five years, further rediscovered operas will be issued on CD as the first recordings – live from the Bayer Kulturhaus. This year, we can look forward to discovering Pasquale Anfossi’s La finta giardiniera.
The Leverkusen/Berlin cultural axis, the stART project and the idea of having a dynamic international ensemble that specialises in historical performances as our “orchestra in residence” opens up opportunities for Volker Mattern, head of Bayer Arts & Culture, and his dedicated team to realise their own projects featuring unusual artistic approaches, which have now been reported on extensively in the arts media.
Further progress has been made in anchoring the work of Bayer Arts & Culture in North Rhine-Westphalia. Noteworthy examples are the collaboration with the Kunstakademie Münster , Folkwang Hochschule Essen, the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. The cooperation with the Cologne academy is a model of a particularly broadly-based collaboration.
Following on from the previous two seasons dedicated to The Arts and Power and Myths in our time, for the coming season we have chosen Knowledge and Belief, a theme with enormous social relevance. We can therefore look forward to another enthralling, varied and fascinating season, with more than 150 events in the fields of music, theatre, dance, art, literature and film dedicated to this theme. They will endeavour to find answers to some controversial aspects of faith and knowledge, but the productions, concerts and exhibitions will doubtless raise an equal number of questions.
The projects centring on children and young people are particularly important to me as they represent nothing less than an investment in the future of our society. In the past season, Bayer Arts & Culture started to make our programme even more attractive to this target group through the HandsOn! series of workshops, courses and excursions. The offerings ranged from fencing courses with students and staff from the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst “Ernst Busch” in Berlin to a taster course in contemporary dance. The children and young people take up these opportunities with a great deal of enthusiasm and pleasure. Incidentally, our stART protégés and the musicians from l’arte del mondo play a very committed role in these education programmes.
When the new season starts in September, music-lovers will miss one figure who has become something of a fixture at Bayer Arts & Culture over the past 38 years: Rainer Koch, the fourth conductor in the more than one-hundred-year history of the Bayer Philharmoniker. With his masterful conducting he has played a very important role in the successful development of the orchestra. His last performance with the orchestra was the 2011 New Year’s Day Concert and his musicians and many other long-standing colleagues gave him a musical send-off at the start of April. On behalf of the many music-lovers in Leverkusen and beyond, I would like to thank Rainer Koch for his tremendous work and wish him all the best and the good health in the future.
I wish Dr. Mattern and his team of organisers the success they deserve with this season’s ambitious theme, Knowledge and Belief, and you all an exciting, enriching and entertaining season.
Yours,
l’arte del mondo, a relatively new ensemble conducted by Werner Ehrhardt, was given an enthusiastic reception by audiences at the festive opening of last year’s season in the chamber music series with Daniel Hope and, above all, in the new series of unknown operas from the Mozart era instigated by Bayer Arts & Culture. The interest shown by the WDR broadcasting station and a well-known international classical music label like Sony testify to the innovative nature of this idea. Over the next five years, further rediscovered operas will be issued on CD as the first recordings – live from the Bayer Kulturhaus. This year, we can look forward to discovering Pasquale Anfossi’s La finta giardiniera.
The Leverkusen/Berlin cultural axis, the stART project and the idea of having a dynamic international ensemble that specialises in historical performances as our “orchestra in residence” opens up opportunities for Volker Mattern, head of Bayer Arts & Culture, and his dedicated team to realise their own projects featuring unusual artistic approaches, which have now been reported on extensively in the arts media.
Further progress has been made in anchoring the work of Bayer Arts & Culture in North Rhine-Westphalia. Noteworthy examples are the collaboration with the Kunstakademie Münster , Folkwang Hochschule Essen, the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. The cooperation with the Cologne academy is a model of a particularly broadly-based collaboration.
Following on from the previous two seasons dedicated to The Arts and Power and Myths in our time, for the coming season we have chosen Knowledge and Belief, a theme with enormous social relevance. We can therefore look forward to another enthralling, varied and fascinating season, with more than 150 events in the fields of music, theatre, dance, art, literature and film dedicated to this theme. They will endeavour to find answers to some controversial aspects of faith and knowledge, but the productions, concerts and exhibitions will doubtless raise an equal number of questions.
The projects centring on children and young people are particularly important to me as they represent nothing less than an investment in the future of our society. In the past season, Bayer Arts & Culture started to make our programme even more attractive to this target group through the HandsOn! series of workshops, courses and excursions. The offerings ranged from fencing courses with students and staff from the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst “Ernst Busch” in Berlin to a taster course in contemporary dance. The children and young people take up these opportunities with a great deal of enthusiasm and pleasure. Incidentally, our stART protégés and the musicians from l’arte del mondo play a very committed role in these education programmes.
When the new season starts in September, music-lovers will miss one figure who has become something of a fixture at Bayer Arts & Culture over the past 38 years: Rainer Koch, the fourth conductor in the more than one-hundred-year history of the Bayer Philharmoniker. With his masterful conducting he has played a very important role in the successful development of the orchestra. His last performance with the orchestra was the 2011 New Year’s Day Concert and his musicians and many other long-standing colleagues gave him a musical send-off at the start of April. On behalf of the many music-lovers in Leverkusen and beyond, I would like to thank Rainer Koch for his tremendous work and wish him all the best and the good health in the future.
I wish Dr. Mattern and his team of organisers the success they deserve with this season’s ambitious theme, Knowledge and Belief, and you all an exciting, enriching and entertaining season.
Yours,
Michael Schade
Head of Corporate Communications
Bayer AG
Head of Corporate Communications
Bayer AG
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