Ultraschall – Festival for new Music
Alexey Retinsky
"C-Dur" for string orchestra (2020)
Elnaz Seyedi
"a mark of our breath" for orchestra
Olga Rayeva
"On the sea" for button accordion and large orchestra
(world premiere)
Oscar Bianchi
"Exordium" for orchestra
Farzia Fallah
"Traces of a Burning Mass" for orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski
Conductor
Vladimir Jurowski - Conductor

Vladimir Jurowski has been Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the RundfunkSinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) since 2017. In 2023/2024, his concerts, tours and recordings were the highlights of the ‘RSB100’ anniversary season. His current contract in Berlin runs until 2027,
while he has also been General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich since 2021.
Vladimir Jurowski, one of the most sought-after conductors of our time, who is celebrated worldwide for his innovative musical interpretations and equally for his courageous artistic commitment, was born in Moscow in 1972 and completed the first part of his music studies at the Music College of the Moscow Conservatory. He moved to Germany with his family in 1990 and continued his studies at the music academies in Dresden and Berlin. In 1995, he made his debut at the Wexford Festival in Ireland with Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Mainacht’ and in 1996 at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with ‘Nabucco’. He was then First Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin (1997-2001).
Vladimir Jurowski worked as Chief Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) for fifteen years until 2021 and has since been appointed Conductor Emeritus. In the UK, he was Music Director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera from 2001 to 2013, leading a wide range of highly acclaimed productions. His close connection to British musical life was recognised by King Charles III in spring 2024 when he appointed Vladimir Jurowski an Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE). In April 2024, Vladimir Jurowski returned to London as a guest conductor to complete the concert performance cycle of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ with ‘Götterdämmerung’ with the LPO at the Royal Festival Hall.
He was Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra ‘Yevgeny Svetlanov’ of the Russian Federation until 2021 and Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Great Britain, as well as Artistic Director of the International George Enescu Festival in Bucharest. He has also worked with the unitedberlin ensemble for many years. Vladimir Jurowski has suspended performances in Russia since February 2022. Ukrainian works are and will remain part of his repertoire, as will works by Russian composers.
Vladimir Jurowski has conducted concerts by the most important orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Berlin, Vienna and New York Philharmonics, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig. He is a regular guest at the music festivals in London, Berlin, Dresden, Lucerne, SchleswigHolstein and Grafenegg. Although Vladimir Jurowski is invited as a guest conductor by top orchestras from all over the world, he now concentrates his activities on those geographical areas that he can easily reach with reasonable effort from an ecological point of view.
The joint CD recordings by Vladimir Jurowski and the RSB began in 2015 with Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 3, followed by works by Britten, Hindemith, Strauss, Mahler and again Schnittke. Vladimir Jurowski has been honoured many times for his achievements, including numerous international record awards. In 2016, he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Philharmonic Society from the hands of the current King Charles III. In 2020, Vladimir Jurowski’s work as Artistic Director of the George Enescu Festival was honoured by the Romanian President with the Order of Cultural Merit.
Roman Yusipey
Button accordion
Roman Yusipey - Button accordion

The accordionist Roman Yusipey was born in the Ukrainian city of Kherson. He studied at the National Academy of Music in Kiev, at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media, at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and at the Cologne University of Music and Dance.
In addition to concerts in Ukraine and Germany, Roman Yusipey has also given guest performances in France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Malta, Italy and Japan.
He has also performed in recent seasons at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Jena Philharmonie, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Mozarteum Salzburg, the Salle Cortot Paris and at Radio Berlin-Brandenburg.
In 2013 he was invited as a guest professor at the Kazakh National Conservatory in Almaty. In 2015 Roman Yusipey recorded a CD “For every city – Ukrainian music of the 21st century for accordion”.
As a soloist, Roman Yusipey has given over 70 concerts with chamber and symphony orchestras under the direction of Andrey Boreyko, Roman Kofman, Raymond Jannsen, Vladimir Sirenko, Gungard Mattes, etc. In active collaboration with numerous contemporary composers, such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli, Helmut Zapf, Victoria Poleva, Dmitri Kourliandski, Oleksandr Schetynskyj, he has interpreted the world premieres of their works.
Roman Yusipey is a welcome guest at international festivals. He is also part of the chamber music formation “Ensemble Levante”. He has also conceived many concert projects of his own, such as ONLY YOUsipey (music of genre paradoxes), Seven Tango (music by Astor Piazzolla) and De Profundius (with works by Sofia Gubaidulina).
He has also worked for a long time as a columnist for feature articles in the Ukrainian and Russian press.
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
Vladimir Jurowski sees himself as a politically aware artist who intervenes and takes a stand on current events. The RSB’s concert at Ultraschall Berlin is therefore particularly characterised by current affairs.
Olga Rayeva: On the sea
Many of her compositions deal with the theme of the sea. This is no coincidence: her early childhood is deeply connected with two cities: Moscow, where there is no sea, and Mariupol, where her mother’s parents lived at the time. She was always very happy in Mariupol and dreamed her whole life of being back there one day, near the somewhat murky, green Sea of Azov. She would then walk along an alleyway in this southern city to the small theatre…
Now neither the theatre nor the town itself exists.
This is a personal tragedy for Olga. The events of the last few years have destroyed her to a large extent internally. And the only way for a composer to deal with trauma is to write music.
Elnaz Seyedi: a mark of our breath
Elnaz Seyedi’s compositions are influenced by literature, architecture and the visual arts as well as her studies in computer science. The sounds often oscillate between rigour and delicacy. Her work “a mark of our breath” was premiered as part of the concert series ‘Miniatures of Time’ – a series of twelve short orchestral pieces commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk from various composers. They all deal with issues of our time, such as sustainability or the coronavirus crisis. Elnaz Seyedi himself writes about a mark of our breath:
“The composition was created in 2021 during a stay in Wendland. Inspired by the expansive view with three quarters of the sky, which is different in every weather and every time of day, but actually always spectacular, and a landscape with a rich spectrum of green and later in autumn of yellow. The piece begins in this peaceful landscape, which gradually breaks up from within. The human voices – played and sung simultaneously in the brass instruments – are on the one hand part of this landscape, enriching it with their very special colour. On the other hand, their flipside is the destruction of the seemingly original.”
Farzia Fallah “Traces of a Burning Mass” for orchestra
Like Seyedi, Farzia Fallah was also born in Iran. Her orchestral work, for which she received the Heidelberg Women Artists’ Prize, was written during the protests against the violent death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in autumn 2022: musical traces of a burning, angry, freedom-loving mass.
The concert can be heard on the radio on the following dates:
Deutschlandfunk Kultur: 18 January 2024, 8:03 pm
rbbKultur: 12 March 2024, 11:03 pm
About the festival:
The “Ultraschall – Festival for New Music” presents recently created works in a music-historical context that goes back to the beginnings of the post-war avant-garde, a period that now spans more than 70 years.
In recent years, more and more premieres and first performances have been presented at the festival, and some of the works are also commissioned by the festival, but the approach remains the same: to give space to current trends in contemporary music and at the same time to categorise these current productions in terms of music history.