These have been really eventful weeks:
My trip to Canada and the Moritzburg Festival.
It has been my very first oversea trip westwards, my debut
with Maestro Kent Nagano, with the Orchestre
Symphonique de Montréal, in Maison Symphonique and
at Festival Lanaudière. This means several debuts at one time!
I also had the pleasure to do a chamber music recital with
members of the OSM. Amonst others we did the
transcriptions by Aribert Reimann of Schumann and
Brahms songs.
Here is a photo taken during the rehearsal at Piano Nobile:
I gained a lot from my work in Canada, and the concerts – I have to admit freely – were fantastic! We could reach out to the people and touch them. With the „little“ chamber music as with the „big“ Mozart Requiem open air in front of 5000 people or Beethoven 9 in festive Maison Symphonique (which by the way has great acoustics!).
In my spare time I listened to other concerts – like the concert for the 40th anniversary of Parc d‘Olympique – and saw as much of Montréal as possible, partly with my dear collegues Michèle Losier, Michael Schade and Alexander Tsymbalyuk. I experienced Montréal as very colourful and open. A lot of nationalities, ways of living, but also the cityscape is colourful: historical churches or other buildings between and next to modern skyscrapers.
This is me on my excursion to Mont-Royal which Montréal
is named after. There are wonderful views from there!
Country and people gave me a warm welcome. One funny thing I found out is the accent: Québecois.
Ca dzure dziis minuites (Ca dure dix minutes) – something like that. Very charming. At the beginning I coudn‘t understand anything, despite speaking nearly fluent French, but fortunately got used to it very quickly.
In December I will be back already. This time for winter (for St Matthews Passion and Brahm‘s Requiem). Looking forward to that very much!!
***
Afterwards, I travelled to Moritzburg (experiencing a huge jetlag, oh dear), being guest for concerts of chamber music – following the invitation of Jan Vogler, the artistic director of the festival.
It has been a wonderful time of working and living together with different artists in a very open and warm atmosphere. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner together, and hopped from from rehearsal to another – everybody being part of different music groups.
My personal highlight was my portrait concert and “Maiblumen blühten überall with string sextet by Alexander Zemlinsky. My highlight as a listener was Mendelssohn’s string octet in E flat major. Fireworks!
These were the artists of the festival 2016:
VIOLIN
Benjamin Beilman
Ye-Eun Choi
Chad Hoopes
Paul Huang
Annabelle Meare
Valeriy Sokolov
Kai Vogler
Mira Wang
VIOLA
Kim Kashkashian
Richard O’Neill
Lawrence Power
Pauline Sachse
VIOLONCELLO
Narek Hakhnazaryan
Li-Wei Qin
Jan Vogler
PIANO
Boris Giltburg
Juho Pohjonen
Antti Siirala
FLUTE
Adam Walker
HARP
Anneleen Lenaerts
SOPRANO
Sarah Wegener
COMPOSER-IN-RESIDENCE
Erkki-Sven Tüür
CONDUCTOR
Josep Caballée Domenech
ASSISTENT
Roman Baltag
For all CINDERELLA-FANS (like me): Parts of the movie “Drei Nüsse für Aschenbrödel (Cinderella – one of THE movies of my childhood) were filmed at castle Moritzburg.
On these stairs Cinderella lost her shoe…
…but on this photo it is mine. I couldn’t resist.
***
SW
