MUSICAL BELONGINGS III. lautten compagney BERLIN trifft Chinesische Klassische Musik: Guzheng und Viola da Gamba

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.

The arched-board zither enters into a musical dialog with the Renaissance viola da gamba and musically transports us back to the time when Chinese and European culture first came into contact. The discourse program is dedicated to the China projections of the European Renaissance as reflected in Marco Polo's travel descriptions. 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 orchestras of early music. In the 39 years since it was founded in 1984, it has delighted music lovers all over the world. In the fall of 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 theater projects in Germany. Its unusual and innovative programs are appreciated by audiences and national and international critics alike. In addition to its performances in Berlin, the lautten compagney tours Germany, Europe and the world with around 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 fall 2021. The lautten compagney recently celebrated the acclaimed premiere of Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" at the Dresden Semperoper as the first guest ensemble in the opera house's recent history.

The lautten compagney cultivates musical traditions with great repertoire works as an important part of its program spectrum. Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble are not only curious about music, but also about new ways of performing it in concert. The lautten compagney has found its own individual platform for experimentation in the :lounge format, among others. Here it shows 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 heart of his multifaceted work as a musician, organizer 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 programs 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 more modern repertoire to great benefit for musicians and audiences alike. Wolfgang Katschner has also been a successful guest conductor at German opera houses for several years. From 2012-2016, 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 Staatstheater Nürnberg: "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 School of Music Berlin, at the Sing-Fest in Hong Kong, Artist in Residence at BarockVokal in Mainz and worked with singers at the Franz Liszt School of Music in Weimar in 2018 and 2019.

- 16,00 € / reduced 8,00 €

- 6 pm: Introduction

- Duration: 90 min

- No language skills required

- Location: Hall 2, ground floor

- Belongs to: Musical Belongings