The house of the Berliner Festspiele is still drawn from the last Festival. Film the window in front of a copper shimmer over the entrance of the empty arms of a German land that has become history. To fit this frame, what Berno Odo Polzer 2019 intends to do with the “Maerzmusik”. The “Festival for time issues,” 31. 3. the phenomenon of the historiography devote, of course, torn from concerts, but spun in discussions and Lectures. This year, a huge video program comes in addition, in the concrete hall of the Silent Green in the Wedding. Here can be followed with free admission, over 200 hours, which Echo the musical avant-garde found in television from the 1950s to the 1990s. Food samples still images on monitors in the festival hall Foyer, to the washed-out snapshots, you can see the challenging look of Frank Zappa, the sweat-drenched Lenny Bernstein, the grin the György Ligeti.

As far as the everything seems. And where contemporary music is that actually, in the emanations of the present time? “The avant-garde without a whimper has crumbled, is bad enough,” says Frederic Rzewski. “But capitalism is still not defeated, that can make a ready to go.” The 80-year-old composer and Pianist, a diehard American cross-head, opened the March music. With the notes of his tremendous variations work “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” under his Arm, he’s testing the wings, watching the leaves slowly, noticed a noise. It is an air root, one accepts in modern halls. Rzewski rejects him, the audience logs-explanatory, then the grey-plays-haired man simply against the hum.

Rzewski knows his job – and the memory of the music

His music is deeply political, and artistic at the same time, the 36 variations, however, from the sad-famous song of the Chilean Left, which soon became the epitome of the resistance against the military dictatorship. Rzewski wrote his work for the birthday of the U.S. Constitution – and, therefore, therein, reminded that it’s his country that helped end democracy in Chile bloody.

The Pianist Igor Levit has discovered Rzewskis variations and, thus, listeners excited. Under Levits hands shines and groans, this work a good 50 minutes before with a hard erkämpftem, loneliness and fear trotzendem Choral appears again in “El pueblo unido jemás será vencido”. Frederic Rzewski is in need of, however, on Friday, nearly 90 minutes, the Menacing resembles him a mud avalanche, the ground work through all Genres swirling fractures, even if not reconciled.

In old age, someone who knows his job and to the memory of the music is here. His 2006 late colleague Horatiu Radulescu could hear his for prepared pianos, created sound installation “Clepsydra” never dreamed of. The Maerz music balanced to a large tag eight tilted wings and open pianos on the stage, the strings exposed for 16 players that make to create the innards of the instruments. The samples will have tasted some of the fingertip. The result sounds depending on the excitation state to a gigantic beehive, after the Wind in the shrouds of a sailing ship or a large glass of music, on drinking vessels, which are barely half full.

More about

Interview with the “Maerzmusik”-head Together, think and experience music

Christopher Warmuth

Frederic Rzewski will be a Variation on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” on the 31. March from 13.00 h in the case of “The Long Now” in Kraftwerk Berlin again. In addition, he brings a new work to premiere.