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 Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin since 2017. He has meanwhile extended his contract until 2027. In parallel, he has been General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich since 2021.
After receiving training at the Moscow Conservatory The conductor, pianist and musicologist Vladimir Jurowski emigrated to Germany in 1990. Here he continued his studies at the music conservatories in Dresden and Berlin. In 1995 he made his international debut at the British Wexford Festival with Rimski-Korsakov’s Mainacht and in the same year at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with Nabucco. Subsequently he was, among other things, First Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin (1997- 2001) and Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (2001-2013). In 2003 Vladimir Jurowski was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and has been its Principal Conductor since 2007 until 2021. He was also Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra Yevgeny Svetlanov of the Russian Federation until 2021, Artistic Director of the International George Enescu Festival in Bucharest and Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Great Britain. He works regularly with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the ensemble unitedberlin.
Vladimir Jurowski has conducted the major orchestras of Europe and North America, including the Berlin, Vienna and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, 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 Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
He is a recurring guest conductor in in London, Berlin, Dresden, Luzern, Schleswig-Holstein und Grafenegg as well as at the Rostopowitsch-Festival. Although Vladimir Jurowski is invited as a guest conductor by top orchestras from all over the world, in future he would like to concentrate his activities on that geographical area which is acceptable to him from an ecological point of view.
In 2022/2023 he performed with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin in concerts in various cities in Germany, Italy and Antwerp in the Netherlands. The joint CD recordings of Vladimir Jurowski and the RSB began in 2015 with Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 3, followed by works by Britten, Hindemith, Strauss, Mahler and soon again Schnittke.
Vladimir Jurowski has been the recipient of numerous awards for his achievements, including various international record prizes. In 2016, he was bestowed an honorary doctorate from Prince Charles at the Royal College of Music in London. In 2018, the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards named him Conductor of the Year. In summer 2020, Jurowski was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the Romanian President in recognition of his work as Artistic Director of the George Enescu Festival.
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.
Veranstalter
Veranstalter
