Elbphilharmonie Visions

With Elbphilharmonie Visions, HamburgMusik and NDR have created a new, internationally outstanding platform for contemporary music in the Elbphilharmonie with the aim of transforming the vision of a musical future into a sounding present. The biennial festival, which is supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, is a 10-day event that presents the most exciting compositions of the last five to ten years. Originally planned for 2021, the first edition was postponed to February 2023 due to the pandemic and was a resounding success.

The organisers are presenting seven concerts that will take the audience on a sonic journey through the contemporary musical landscape and give the latter a prominent place in the Elbphilharmonie’s internationally acclaimed concert programme. The Elbphilharmonie’s Great Hall is particularly well suited to contemporary music. One reason for this is the special, analytical acoustics, which make refined details audible in the finely woven scores of contemporary compositions. The attractiveness of the venue itself increases the proportion of enthusiastic listeners outside of a narrow specialised audience and increases openness to new listening experiences.

At the centre of the festival are the orchestras of the radio stations under the direction of renowned conductors of contemporary music. The NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, the orchestra of cooperation partner NDR, will perform twice under the direction of Alan Gilbert – both at the opening and closing concerts of the festival. The NDR Vokalensemble, the SWR Symphonieorchester under Emilio Pomàrico, the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Ryan Bancroft, the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover under Pierre Bleuse, the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna under Bas Wiegers and the hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt under the direction of Matthias Hermann will also be performing.

Outstanding soloists such as Arabella Steinbacher, Anja Petersen, Florian Hölscher, Christoph Sietzen and Lawrence Power have a broad following thanks to previous performances in the Elbphilharmonie and are therefore suitable ambassadors for unfamiliar repertoire. The festival programme makes a decisive contribution to the addition of new key works to the concert repertoire. To this end, a selection was made of compositions that have been premiered all over the world: On the one hand, works that are already recognised as elementary and future-oriented in the new music scene, but for which there has not yet been any anchoring in the general reception history. On the other hand, works that are still completely new and have only recently begun their journey through the concert halls. This is precisely where the festival comes in, programming compositions by the younger generation of composers around Francesca Verunelli, Bernd Richard Deutsch and Johannes Maria Staud and embedding them in the works of key contemporary composers such as Olga Neuwirth and Helmut Lachenmann. A new work by Alex Paxton will be premiered at the opening concert.

Further information:
elbphilharmonie.de

Dates

February 7 – 16, 2025
Elbphilharmonie, Great Hall, Hamburg