The experience of fragility in people’s own existence and the collective threat have found manifold echoes in the arts. New orchestral works by Matthias Pintscher, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini, Miroslav Srnka, Beat Furrer and Charlotte Seither are powerful testimony to an exceptional period.

Matthias Pintscher

“neharot” for orchestra, says composer Matthias Pintscher, was written “during the worst period of the many daily deaths in the spring of 2020, and is a clear echo of the desolation and fear, but also of the hope for light that so emotionally characterised this time in our lives.” The title is significant: “‘Neharot’ means rivers in Hebrew, but also tears. It also describes the tears of lamentation.” It is the extremely low notes of the bass instruments which push forward into the foreground: an echo of the blackest sonorities. “As the music evokes the river as a sonorous phenomenon,” says Pintscher, “it is also inspired by the secrets of the Cathedral in Chartres, where several rivers cross exactly beneath the place where Chartres was built (and rebuilt, after it burnt down, was totally destroyed by fate and rose again) ... that is, a symbol of the emotional content of the music. The piece is a ‘Tombeau’, a ‘Requiem’, a ‘Kaddish’ – for all those people we have lost in this unprecedented time.”

At exactly that time Pintscher composed “la linea evocativa”. The solo violin work was premiered online by Leila Josefowicz in November 2020. The subtitle, “un disegno per violino solo”, means a drawing. Expressive figures reflect the overwhelming uncertainty and the dissonant emotions felt throughout the world in the face of the situation at that time. This solo piece became the starting point for Matthias Pintscher’s third violin concerto, “Assonanza” for violin and chamber orchestra. Analogous to the meaning of the word, the concerto is a game with echoes and variations of musical sound explorations between the solo instrument and the resonating space of the orchestra.


Miroslav Srnka

In contrast to Matthias Pintscher’s empathetic-expressive approach, Miroslav Srnka’s orchestral work Superorganisms reflects a scientific and sociological phenomenon: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. “Superorganisms” are forms of life in which homogenous living beings work together synergetically and with their own organisation. The individual members would barely be viable on their own, but in the community they develop far beyond themselves – a “multiplication of the positive power of the individual”, as Miroslav Srnka says. In fact, an example of superorganisms in human culture which has long existed is the symphony orchestra – and this is where Miroslav Srnka’s new piece begins. “Each member of the orchestra has an independent role, there are literally thousands of tiny points, lines and pillars of sound. Srnka embarks on a search for consonance – on the one hand, for sounds which tend towards consistency and want to linger, on the other hand for opportunities to translate such chords into something fluid. “The more consonant the intervals are, the more resonance with which they flow into each other; thus virtual spots of consonance emerge in the carpet of sound”. The combination of the individual parts in their groups reinforces their effects: “In the community the individual does not become weaker, but stronger, and the world as a whole more multifaceted.” (Malte Krasting)


Beat Furrer

As in a series of paintings, in his orchestral studies “Tableaux I–IV” Beat Furrer explores specific musical textures between quasi mechanical, unique “speaking” events which open out. It is concerned with deep impacts, with the enmeshing of large-scale developments, layerings and the finest natural and irregular voices emanating from this. They are inspired by early paintings by Max Ernst, entitled “Wald und Sonne”, in which monolithic configurations of vertically-towering trees can be seen which branch out into fine structures and are peopled by living creatures. Accordingly, says Furrer, there are “constant transformations of the sound, a movement which constantly occurs from below to above in various harmonic constellations. Behind this another level appears: voices which cry, shout, whisper, talk or sing. Behind the regular structure there are unstable, irregular phenomena.”

After purely musical ways of looking at problems, in “Sechs Gesänge für Vokalensemble und Orchester”, Beat Furrer pursues the question of where does being human, where does humanity, begin and end?  Furrer has set texts by the Argentinian writer Sara Gallardo from her 1971 novel “Eisejuaz”, which tells of the exploitation and destruction of the indigenous world through colonisation from a present-day perspective. In Eisejuaz the author gives one of the descendants a voice. “In essence it is about the loss of a connectedness with the ‘other’, with what we call nature. And this loss is a painful experience for him, which he constantly tries to overcome, in ritual invocations of the trees, the animals and the ‘Mensajeros’ [messengers] which connect him with this world. I am concerned with this form of animistic consciousness which we have lost, the consciousness of the connection to the ‘other’ ... For me, the voice itself and listening are important. What we need is a new ear for the voice of the other and a new listening to the ‘other’.” (Beat Furrer)


Charlotte Seither

Time and again, the theme of “saying goodbye” has inspired composers to examine this experience artistically – whether it be a temporary farewell, or whether it be death. In so doing, works have often been composed which are characterised by a very personal approach. Charlotte Seither faces final questions in “zu welcher Stunde” for chamber orchestra: “Is it about mourning and death, or is life itself (still) at the centre? Which is the hour which we do not know – that of death or that of redemption from all the (futile) longing? A floating figure on the tubular bells introduces the piece. A plaintive cry to the dead? A ringing of human longing to be heard and seen, for life?” The work constantly stretches across new, greater arcs. At the end, it finally flows into a new layer of sound in which movement and pausing penetrate in equal measure. “Are call and (open) response ultimately the same?”


Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini

The title of Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s “Wunde(r) for orchestra”, a work commissioned by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, associates and amalgamates two ostensibly quite contradictory themes: the wound – physical, but also psychological, as an expression of illness and pain – and the wonder – as a sign of an unexpected cure. In his work, Scartazzini refers to the story of the Galician Torah scholar Mendel Singer in Joseph Roth’s novel “Hiob” [Job], who turns away from his faith after a multitude of blows of fate and only later finds God again, after the miraculous cure of his last-born child from epilepsy and his meteoric rise to become a successful musician. Mendel is overwhelmed “by the weight of happiness and the greatness of the miracle” and dies happy. This story has accompanied Scartazzini for many years and became the inspiration for “Wunde(r)” and its dramaturgical structure, which the composer describes:  “The piece is divided into three interconnecting sections. The first section is funeral music, chamber music-like, melancholy, introvert; the second part an agitato, as wild as the biblical wound-inflicting plagues; by contrast, the third section is peaceful; here the material of the funeral music is used again, but transformed in expression into peace and security.” Wounds finally become wonders – musically too.

Marie Luise Maintz/André-Philipp Hechinger
(from “[t]akte" 2023 / translation: Elizabeth Robinson)