Ultraschall – Festival for new Music
Malin Bång
"avgår, pågår" for orchestra
Anna Korsun
"In another room" for orchestra with smartphones
Sergei Nevsky
"Stages of Ideas" for speaker and twenty solo strings on a text by Lev Tolstoy
Oxana Omelchuk
"Harmoniemusiken" for orchestra
Kristine Tjøgersen
"Between Trees" for orchestra
Susanne Blumenthal
Conductor
Susanne Blumenthal - Conductor

Susanne Blumenthal is one of the most versatile conductors of her generation.
With her ensemble “MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik” she performs at numerous festivals, such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, at ECLAT, Acht Brücken Köln, the pgnm Festival Bremen, klub katarakt Hamburg, as well as internationally at the Mixtur Festival Barcelona, Festival de música contemporánea Oviedo, Society for contemporary music Seoul and in numerous countries in Southeast Asia.
She has worked with composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Hans Zender, Nicolaus A. Huber, Friedrich Cerha, Johannes Kalitzke, Mark Andre, Georges Aperghis, Simon Steen-Andersen, Beat Furrer, Oxana Omelchuk, Gordon Kampe, Ying Wang, Vito Zuraj and many others.
Engagements have repeatedly taken her to Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Acht Brücken Köln, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Städtische Bühnen Münster, Kölner Philharmonie, Bochumer Symphoniker, DLF and more.
She is the artistic director of the eos chamber orchestra, with whom she explores the borderlands of new music and improvised music / jazz and is a guest at numerous festivals, such as the Moers Festival, the Bonn Jazz Festival and the Monheim Triennale.
Originally studying choral conducting, numerous choirs also came under her direction, including the Philharmonic Choir of Bochum for several years.
She was a scholarship holder of both the International Ensemble Modern Academy and the Bergische Symphoniker.
Susanne Blumenthal was appointed Professor of Interpretation / Ensemble Practice New Music at the Cologne University of Music and Dance in 2021.
Jakob Diehl
Narrator
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
Patriotism and Government’ is the title of a polemical text by Lev Tolstoy from 1900, in which the poet opposes all kinds of nationalism, the inevitable consequence of which is war. Tolstoy opposes the nationalistic furor with utopian ideas of equality and also ecological fading. Sergei Nevsky, who early and unequivocally condemned the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, confronts Tolstoy’s text with a fragile, transparent orchestral setting that deliberately relies on polyphony, i.e. polyphony.
Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun has only one movement for her work: “The piece invites us on a sound journey through imaginary spaces.” In these spaces, musically characterized by concentration and calm, reality then breaks in again and again.
Harmoniemusiken by the Belarusian composer Oxana Omelchuk seems like a counterpart to this: Omelchuk describes her “adaptations of imaginary pieces” from which she extracts “idimoatic signs, figures, clichés” as an “attempt at music located in no-man’s land”.
Framing these three works are two soundwalks. Malin Bång traces the “urban moment” in her hometown of Gothenburg and musically develops its “‘staged’ version.” Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen takes the audience into the forest, with sounds of squirrels, owls and magpies. An idyll?
Recordings will be broadcast:
DLF Kultur 19.01.2023, 8.03 p.m.
rbb Kultur 14.3.2023, 10.03 p.m.