Tona Scherchen-Hsiao + Olga Neuwirth beim / at Ultraschall Berlin – Festival für neue Musik

19.01.2019 – 20.01.2019 / 15:00 – 17:00

20 Years of Ultraschall Berlin – this also means 19 years of partnership with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. In 2000, the second year of the festival, a concert of works by Frangis Ali-Sade marked the beginning of this extraordinarily productive collaboration. Since then numerous artist-program guests have been extensively profiled at Ultraschall Berlin, which occasionally – as was the case with Simon Steen-Andersen – even became the starting point for a longer career.
We take a look back in this anniversary year with an orchestral piece by Tona Scherchen-Hsiao and pay tribute to the first female composer to ever receive this fellowship in 1977, a decade and a half after the program was founded. Her piece »L’Illégitime« was created in 1986 for the Saarbrücker Festival for Twentieth Century Music. »A film unfolds on the audiovisual screen of our inner ear,« writes Scherchen about her orchestral piece, »Topical flashes, coming from the everyday life of the big city,« create sound images of a »world of rapid topicality, of violence.«

20.1. at Volksbühne Berlin
Additional information on the program here.

radio broadcast:
Deutschlandfunk Kultur Konzert
23.1. 20:03 h
Kulturradio vom rbb Konzert
2.2. 20:04 h

Olga Neuwirth was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 1996. “Music is always closed off in a certain way because it first has to be pieced together in the head of every listener,” she says. And this experience is constantly being repeated in the works of this composer when, for example, an e-bow is used to play a piano string in »QUASARE / PULSARE II,« the playing of an Ondes Martenot augments the sounds of the piano in »incidendo / fluido,« or when Olga Neuwirth writes a piece in memory of Austrian film director Michael Glawogger entitled »Weariness heals wounds,« which makes reference to the last time the two met before Glawogger’s death.

19.1. at Heimathafen Neukölln
Additional information on the program here.

radio broadcast:
Deutschlandfunk Kultur Tonart Klassik
28.1. 01:05 h
Kulturradio vom rbb Musik der Gegenwart
6.3. 21:04 h

19.1. 15:00 h
Boulanger Trio presents works by Olga Neuwirth u.a.
Admission: 15,– / 10,– €
Heimathafen Neukölln, Karl-Marx-Str. 141, 12043 Berlin

20.1. 17:00 h
Sebastian Berweck // Neue Vocalsolisten // RSB // Michael Wendeberg present works by Tona Scherchen-Hsiao u.a.
Admission: 18,– / 14,– €
Volksbühne Berlin, Linienstraße 227, 10178 Berlin