Together with the classical Chinese guzheng player Xu Fengxia, the lautten compagney BERLIN ensemble performs baroque music from Venice in combination with classical Chinese music written for the guzheng.
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Musical Belongings #3
The arched-board zither enters into a musical dialogue with the Renaissance viola da gamba, musically transporting us back to the time when Chinese and European culture first came into contact. The discourse programme is dedicated to the European Renaissance's projections of China as reflected in Marco Polo's travelogues. The Chinese pentatonic system will be compared with the European tonal system.
lautten compagney BERLIN
The lautten compagney BERLIN under the direction of Wolfgang Katschner is one of the most renowned early music orchestras. In the 39 years since its founding in 1984, it has delighted music lovers all over the world. In autumn 2019, it was awarded the OPUS Klassik as Ensemble of the Year. It sets unique musical accents with concerts, opera performances and crossover projects. The ensemble is one of the few independent producers of music theatre projects in Germany. Its unusual and innovative programmes are appreciated by audiences as well as national and international critics. In addition to its performances in Berlin, the lautten compagney tours Germany, Europe and the world with about 100 concerts a year. The last major non-European tours took them to ten cities in China in 2019 and to Bogotá in Colombia in autumn 2021. At the Dresden Semperoper, the lautten compagney recently celebrated the acclaimed premiere of Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" as the first guest ensemble in the house's recent history.
The lautten compagney cultivates musical traditions as an important part of its programme spectrum with great repertoire works. Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble are not only curious about music, but also about new ways of presenting it in concert.
The lautten compagney cultivates musical traditions as an important part of its programme spectrum with great repertoire works. Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble are not only curious about music, but also about new ways of presenting it in concert. The lautten compagney has found its own individual platform for experimentation with the :lounge format, among others. Here it demonstrates that early music and contemporary music can indeed be combined. In the :lounge, live sampling and sounds enrich the timbres of the baroque instruments and offer space for surprising improvisations. When old works are inspired by new ideas in this way, musical boundaries disappear.
Wolfgang Katschner
A lutenist by training, Wolfgang Katschner founded the lautten compagney BERLIN together with Hans-Werner Apel in 1984, the centrepiece of his multifaceted work as a musician, organiser and researcher in the sound worlds of "early music".
On CDs, Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble present themselves as border crossers; alongside world premiere recordings of operas such as "Didone abbandonata" are unusual combinations of composers: Philipp Glass and Tarquinio Merula ("Timeless"), Heinrich Schütz and Friedrich Hollaender ("War & Peace") and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Astor Piazzolla ("Misterio"). Each of these programmes stands for the conviction that "early" music is just as modern as music written later and, once one steps out of one's self-imposed isolation as a musician of "early" music, can be combined with modern repertoire in an extremely profitable way for musicians and audiences alike. For some years now, Wolfgang Katschner has also been a successful guest conductor at German opera houses. From 2012 to 2016 he was musical director of the Winter in Schwetzingen;
After guest appearances in Bonn (Handel's "Rinaldo" and "Giulio Cesare") and Oldenburg (Hasse's "Siroe"), he was responsible for several opera productions at the Nuremberg State Theatre: "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria", "Serse", "La Calisto" and "Bajazet". Most recently, Katschner conducted Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" at the Semperoper Dresden. Wolfgang Katschner is also increasingly involved in the training of young artists. He was a guest professor at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin, at the Sing-Fest in Hong Kong, artist in residence at BarockVokal in Mainz and worked with singers at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar in 2018 and 2019.
- 16 € / reduced 8 €
- 18.00 Introduction
- Duration: 90 min
- No language skills required
- Hall 2, ground floor
- Belongs to: Musical Belongings
