KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN – CENTER

We wish you a happy and healthy new year and hope to see you soon at one of our events!

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the first concert of ensemble hartmann21 for the year 2020 has to be postponed again. The event will now take place on September 22, 2020. We hope for a soon and healthy reunion with you!

The concerts of the ensemble hartmann21 will take place on the following dates in 2020
July 29 (postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic)
September 22 (postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic)
October 14

We look forward to your visit!

With the violinist Ingolf Turban, one of the most outstanding and exciting musicians encounters the work of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, exposes himself to it, reflects, traces references and – as an interpreter – lets the listener participate in his individual world of experience. In a singularly composed program, Turban creates a kaleidoscope of different perspectives and modes of perception, allowing one to experience Hartmann’s musically progressive Second suite for violin solo in a new way.
In National Socialist Germany, Hartmann rigorously refused to be appropriated by the totalitarian regime and retreated into “inner emigration”, while at the same time he tried to speak all the more eloquently abroad and was also perceived as a symbol of a “different Germany” – which set culture and humanism against barbarism. He consciously understood his composition as a “Gegenaktion” [“counteraction”]. In each of his works, Hartmann sought international solidarity with allies in spirit, be it through the use of texts and melodies of forbidden artists or with the help of Jewish songs. Especially the use of the Jewish “Eliyahu hanavi” in all compositions of the years 1933 to 1945 became Hartmann’s lament for the extermination of the Jewish people, but also stood for the persecution of all opponents of the regime. The first traces of Jewish melismas can be found in his early work as early as 1927 and lead to the first expressions in Hartmann’s Second suite for solo violin.
“After Bach and Reger, it is probably only Hartmann who succeeded in giving the violin such an unusually complex polyphony. This is all the more astonishing when one considers that Hartmann, as a trombone student of only 22 years of age at the time, was able to fathom the possibilities of the violin so brilliantly to the limits of what was possible,” said Ingolf Turban in an interview in 2013 (Festschrift for the international “Karl Amadeus Hartmann Year 2013”).
It is therefore only logical that our concert will cover a wide range from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 to Béla Bartók’s Melodia and Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for solo violin op. 31, No. 2. Paul Hindemith, too, still needs to be comprehended far more pluralistically and celebrated for his occasionally even humorous variety of colours.

An event of the © Karl Amadeus Hartmann-Gesellschaft e. V., sponsored by Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München und Bezirk Oberbayern.

With our programme we would like to begin by drawing a bow to the beginnings of the musica viva founded in 1945 by Karl Amadeus Hartmann. With solo works by Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti, two compositions by Hartmann’s closest companions and most incisive figures in 20th century music history form a programmatic bracket around Hartmann’s early First suite for piano. In 1945 the then twenty-year-old Boulez composed his Douze Notations: twelve pieces in twelve bars of twelve notes. More than thirty years later, it was precisely these miniatures that were to serve him as the germ cell for his epoch-making orchestral work of the same name. Aphoristic brevity, unmistakably expressionistic sound intensity and a rigorous serial approach to compositional technique are the defining characteristics that make this work the aesthetic manifesto of the young Pierre Boulez.
Before György Ligeti fled Hungary to the West in 1956 for political and artistic reasons, he composed a whole series of early works in succession to Béla Bartók; among them is the solo sonata for cello, written between 1948 and 1953. Although her two movements still reveal Bartók’s folkloristically influenced “folk tone”, the committee of the Communist Union of Composers considered the work “too modern” and banned its performance.
After Pierre Boulez, Philippe Manoury is probably the figurehead of the French avant-garde par excellence. In recent years, the question of the various forms of musical interaction has increasingly moved into the focus of his work and his writings on music theory. This moment also characterizes his work Ultima, in which new possibilities of playing together among “free” individuals are tested: “This voluntary independence in the behavior of the three instruments was suggested to me by the heterogeneity of their respective natures,” says the composer in the preface to his score.
Finally, our ensemble hartmann21 will adress itself to a new work by the 29-year-old Mexican composer Carlos G. Hernández, who will also enrich our subsequent round of discussions. Similar to Philippe Manoury, in his work 5(233n, Hernández deals with the theme of communication or isolation between individuals in the age of digital media and transfers this to the interaction of the instrumental voices.

An event of the © Karl Amadeus Hartmann-Gesellschaft e. V., sponsored by Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München, LfA Förderbank Bayern and Bezirk Oberbayern.