The Zafraan Ensemble is celebrating its 10th anniversary!
For its tenth anniversary, i.e. the tenth of a century, the Zafraan Ensemble is planning a very ambitious project. In a series of ten chamber concerts, the history of Berlin from the 1910s to today will be told as a musical one.
Contemporary music history is made into history, across two world wars and five forms of government.
It begins, something else would be unthinkable, directly with a heavyweight, one could even say – if it weren’t about 20th century music – with a hit: Pierrot Lunaire by Schönberg. In the end, even Puccini thought it was great. But Hanns Eisler, who we will certainly meet again later, was so impressed that he used Pierrot as a blueprint for his setting of Morgenstern’s Palmström. And he wasn’t the last one left; Schönberg’s vocal treatment and casting influenced ensemble and vocal composition beyond measure and time, even up to Enno Poppe, 85 years later. With his quintet, Deleted Songs, he imitates the cyclical circling of the song without it congealing into a pattern. Material levels playfully intersect each other, “Holy Crosses” give bright colors that shimmer but do not dissonate. “You could perhaps describe my chords as bent spectral chords,” Poppe sums up, “or as dented nature.
The 1910s: necks with crosses
Enno Poppe (*1969)
Deleted Songs (1996-99)
Hanns Eisler (1898-1962)
Palmström op.5 (1925)
Florian Wessel (*1991)
absinthe (UA, 2020)
BREAK
Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951)
Pierrot Lunaire op. 21 (UA Berlin 1912)
Zafraan Ensemble (Flute: Liam Mallett
Clarinet: Horia Dumitrache (guest)
Violin/Viola: Emmanuelle Bernard
Violoncello: Martin Smith
Piano: Clemens Hund-Göschel)
Soprano: Eva Resch
Conductor: Miguel Pérez Iñesta
Moderation: Mark Scheibe
Artistic direction: M. Smith, J. Gerhard, C. Hund-Göschel
Concept: M. Smith, S. Weihrauch, S. Solte, J. Gerhard
