The Goethe-Institut Boston continues its ongoing exploration of contemporary music from Germany with this music festival in collaboration with musicians, composers and musicologists from Germany and the US. Four programs, each curated and performed by guest artists, showcase composers and musicians from Germany’s contemporary music scene and relate stories from history, personal relationships and transatlantic cooperation. You will hear works rarely heard in Boston by Germany-based composers like Helmut Lachenmann, Walter Zimmermann, Isabel Mundry, and Rebecca Saunders alongside the US premiere of a work by Harvard PhD student Isaac Blumfield. Join us for one or all four concerts which feature performances for percussion, cello, violin, piano and voice. Post-concert receptions provide an opportunity to connect with the musicians, composers and other audience members over a glass of wine.
Schedule of Events
March 2, 2025
7:30 PM
Between Words and Worlds
Concert | Collage New Music, conducted by Anna Handler, performs works by Widmann, Neuwirth, and Roustom among others
Pre-Concert Talk at 6:30pm with Artistic Director Eric Nathan and featured composers.
This concert features the Boston conducting debut of German-Colombian conductor, Anna Handler, currently the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Assistant Conductor. The program revolves around themes of language, memory, life, and death in the human and natural worlds, as well as the supernatural.
Artists:
Vocal works bookend the program: Kareem Roustom’s Xarja, which speaks of love, loss, and refuge, and Jörg Widmann’s Sieben Abgesänge auf eine tote Linde, a requiem for a tree, in part from the tree’s perspective.
Kareem Roustom: Xarja (2017)
soprano and percussion
Olga Neuwirth: Magic Flu-Idity (2018)
flute and typewriter/wine glasses
Gabriela Ortiz: El águila bicéfala (2005)
flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano
Jingmian Gong (2024 Collage Fellow): Elegy (2024) world premiere (Collage Commission)
flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion
Gabriella Smith: Anthozoa (2018)
violin, cello, piano, percussion
Jörg Widmann: Sieben Abgesänge auf eine tote Linde (1997)
soprano, clarinet, violin, piano
Price
$35 General Admission / $15 Students
Date: March 2 - 9, 2025
