Portrait Isabel Mundry

Since the world premiere of the opera Ein Atemzug – Odyssee in 2005 and occasional performances of ensemble and orchestral works in the 2010s, there have hardly been any major presentations of Isabel Mundry’s music in Berlin.

The composer, who has lived and worked in Berlin for many years, turned sixty in 2023, which Musikfest Berlin wants to celebrate with a portrait focus. The composer’s work will be presented for the first time at Musikfest Berlin, which has been running for 20 years and is a continuation of the former Berliner Festwochen. The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation is making the portrait concerts on September 7 and 8, 2024 possible.

Isabel Mundry’s music stands for an aesthetic position that also derives its advanced musical language from an examination of early European music history, i.e. the art of a time when there was no such thing as a symphony orchestra – the central “apparatus” of Musikfest Berlin. How does the music of the cumulative past continue into the present? Isabel Mundry sees her music as a dialog between times. The portrait opens with an evening with the Ensemble Musikfabrik and pieces that explore and enable historical echo chambers of Gregorian chant and the Baroque. At the second portrait concert, a surprisingly different Beethoven meets works by Isabel Mundry, who finds the music of the present in the historical material, peels it out, excavates it, as an archaeologist searching for the future: Ensemble Resonanz presents the final version of her piece Signaturen, which is based on the last bar of a Mozart sonata, before Riccardo Minasi leads the ensemble through an unheard interpretation of Beethoven’s Eroica.

Further information:
berlinerfestspiele.de

Dates

September 7 and 8, 2024
Berliner Philharmonie