Newsletter

News about the schedule Personal recommendations Special offers ... Stay well informed!

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to our Newsletter and receive 25% off your next ticket purchase.

* Mandatory field





Newsletter

Schedule - Deutsche Oper Berlin

Skip Media Container

Musikfest Berlin in the Philharmonie / Generational performance

Italia Nera – Symphony concert as part of the Musikfest Berlin

Works by Ottorino Respighi, Luigi Nono and Giuseppe Verdi

Information on the piece

2 hours / one interval

In Italian with German and English surtitles

recommended from 15 years
Share this post
Cast
Dates & Tickets
Our thanks to our partners

A concert in cooperation with Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin. This concert will be recorded on 10 September and broadcast on ‘radio3’ from rbb on 22 September 2024 at 8.03 pm.

Cast
About the performance

The programme includes

Ottorino Respighi [1879 – 1936]
Feste Romane
Circenses – Il Giubileo– L’Ottobrata – La Befana

Luigi Nono [1924 – 1990]
Canti di vita e d’amore: Sul ponte di Hiroshima for soprano, tenor and orchestra

Giuseppe Verdi [1813 – 1901]
OTELLO, Act IV

Italia noir: the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper presents a sultry evening of Italian music. In the acoustic equivalent of cinemascope, Ottorino Respighi transports the orchestra to the bloodthristy arena of ancient Rome, Luigi Nono counters the horrors of the present with life and love. And Giuseppe Verdi’s OTELLO is one of the most tragic of operas – here we hear the finale.

In the first section of his vividly realised sound fresco “Feste romane” Ottorino Respighi leads his audience directly into the ancient Circus Maximus, where the Emperor Nero has a group of martyrs thrown to the lions: the strings take on their choral part, while clarinets, bassoons and trombones imitate the growls of the animals with naturalistic glissandi. By contrast, in his “Canti di vita e d’amore” from 1962, Luigi Nono rejected cruelty in any form, although all three parts are concerned with different aspects of violence and oppression and look for possible ways of counteracting criminal insanity. The bridge in Hiroshima referred to in the subtitle is one indication of this. Alongside these two works, Sir Donald Runnicles and the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin will also perform Act Four of Giuseppe Verdi’s tragic opera OTELLO, in which the hero (Otello), his unjustly accused wife (Desdemona) and a cold-blooded plotter (Iago) meet in a conventionally-gendered triangle. No other Italian opera composer of the 19th century dealt as ruthlessly with death in his stage works as Verdi: at the very beginning of his career he noted that opera should make its audience feel “tears, horror and death through singing.” He undoubtledly succeeded in this in Act Four of OTELLO, where the orchestra plays a prominent part in its spellbinding effect: sombre chords in the deepest possible instrumental register leave no doubt at the end that the death of the fallen hero will bring no redemption.

Enter Onepager
1

slide_title_1

slide_description_1

slide_headline_2
2

slide_title_2

slide_description_2

slide_headline_3
3

slide_title_3

slide_description_3

slide_headline_4
4

slide_title_4

slide_description_4

Create / edit OnePager
15
DEC

Advents-Verlosung: Das 15. Fensterchen

For almost two decades, the two creative minds behind our big band – Sebastian ‘Sese’ Krol and Rüdiger ‘Rübe’ Ruppert – have been curating brilliant evenings of jazz: a radiant highlight of this work took place on 19 September 2022, when Charles Mingus' “Epitaph” was performed in the sold-out Philharmonie. This concert was a tribute to Mingus' 100th birthday and was a sensation, which is now available as a CD on the EuroArts label. We are giving away this CD in today's Advent window.

Win one of two CDs of Charles Mingus' “Epitaph”, recorded live at the Philharmonie. If you want to be one of the winners, send an e-mail to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de today with the subject “The 15th little window”.

Charles Mingus caused a sensation in 1959 with his album ‘Ah Um’, which catapulted him into the pantheon of jazz. Immediately afterwards, he devoted himself to an even bolder vision: a suite for orchestra, part improvised, part composed – written for an ensemble of two complete big bands plus additional orchestral instruments. It was to be a work of the ‘third way’, combining jazz with the classical modernism of a Bartók and Stravinsky, but at the same time his personal opus summum. We are talking about ‘Epitaph’. In Berlin in 2022, conductor Titus Engel brought it to the stage: together with Charles Mingus' companion Randy Brecker, with musicians from the BigBand and the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Jazz Institute Berlin.

Charles Mingus himself never heard the full version of ‘Epitaph’. That's because the 1962 premiere was a fiasco, perhaps the biggest in jazz history. It happened at the Town Hall in New York: everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Mingus wrote highly complex music, but had only scheduled three rehearsals. Trombonist Jimmy Knepper became a copyist, transcribing sheet music that Mingus produced every day. There was no end to it, he kept changing, adding to and expanding the music. Knepper couldn't keep up. Mingus became bad-tempered, then angry, then hated the world. The pressure was on: the record company wanted to record live – extremely unusual at the time. Eventually the concert took place, the sheet music wasn't ready, the tension between the musicians was unmistakable, and the audience didn't like the badly played music. The concert ended in a police intervention. The second part was never played. Mingus died in 1979 without ever having heard his major work. The 500 pages of sheet music were discovered years later in an old suitcase belonging to his widow Sue.

‘The music is very varied, very dense, powerful, a unique work between genres,’ says Titus Engel in 2022. The conductor of this CD recording is – like Mingus – equally at home in the worlds of classical, new and jazz music, and he plays double bass like the master. And so the rarely heard work was brought to new life in this concert by the BigBand of the Deutsche Oper Berlin: Not only was there sufficient rehearsal time for the concert in Berlin and the atmosphere between the musicians was enthusiastic, but the sheet music was also newly created based on the critical new edition.

Listen to Charles Mingus' “Epitaph” conducted by Titus Engel with musicians from the BigBand and the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Jazz Institute Berlin, with Jorge Puerta (speaker / tenor) and Randy Brecker (trumpet). The CD was released on the EuroArts label.



Closing date: 15 December 2024. The winners will be informed by email on 16 December 2024. The CDs will be sent by post. The judges' decision is final.