6. Sinfoniekonzert: More than music

I see an ensemble as a sculpture and while I write, I imagine what it will look like in the end. (Lisa Streich)

The concert series more than music is an opportunity for the State Opera to explore the limits of the traditional concert format with performative curiosity. At the core of the series are three world premieres in 2023 and 2024, composed for the State Orchestra of Lower Saxony Hanover and funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Three very distinct composers were invited to develop their own multi-disciplinary vision of concert music and to bring it to the stage of the opera house with a guest artist.
In May 2023, the Swedish composer Lisa Streich will launch this series. She lives on the island of Gotland, very close to the sea – an ideal place to “search for the internal hearing”, as she says. “I write what I want to hear and what I have not yet found elsewhere.” Lisa Streich not only invents fascinating, unheard sounds, but she also includes movement and space into her scores: “At times, certain movements emerge automatically when the music is played, and then I compose choreographically. Sometimes, the musicians are placed in the space in an unusual way. I often work with tonal contrasts and these will profit further from the visual level.” Streich will realise her world premiere-project together with the Austrian artist Markus Schinwald, whose work was presented in a large-scale exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover in 2011. He grew up in Salzburg and was influenced by the city’s annual festival from an early age. Trained as a tailor, he is particularly interested in crossing borders between genres like painting, performance, costume design, photography and video art.

General music director Stephan Zilias has chosen to combine Igor Stravinsky’s captivating ballet music Petrushka with this world premiere. In iridescent orchestral colours, Stravinsky carries us off to a historical Russian fairground, where a Punch and Judy-show bursts out of its puppet theatre and becomes dramatic reality. Following the brilliant performances of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps of the past season, Stephan Zilias will place another great score that the Russian exile composed for Ballets russes in Paris into the limelight. Stravinsky’s first score for Paris, Der Feuervogel (The Firebird) can be enjoyed as a ballet by Marco Goecke at the start of the season.