LUCERNE FESTIVAL | Beethoven Farewell | English

BEETHOVEN FA R E W E L L with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Igor Levit

20 – 22 November 2020 English

RELATED PROGRAM “Ludwig van” 21.11.

Film by Mauricio Kagel | Germany 1969/70 | 91’ 22.11.

15.00

11.00 stattkino Luzern

CHF 18/15 Reservations: t +41 (0)41 410 30 60 or info@stattkino.ch

Ludwig van, Mauricio Kagel’s main work for the film medium, shows Beethoven making a return to Bonn – in 1970. Kagel sets the composer face to face with late-20th-century consumer society, the Beethoven cult, and the marketing of his 200th birthday. He asked such artists as Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, and Robert Filliou to design an imaginary Beethoven House and wrote the soundtrack himself by creating a wild Beethoven collage.

22.11.

13.00

YOUNG Event in cooperation with Kultissimo Detailed information at lucernefestival.ch

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On Beethoven

“Beethoven addressed himself to the fearless performer. His music demands an absurd swiftness of reaction as well as self-assurance. If you’re focused only on managing to play, it can quickly become very, very difficult. The fearless performer may be a fictional ideal. In this regard, certain passages of the Hammerklavier Sonata are utopian.”

Igor Levit “How do you get these old pieces to once again sound so fresh that you can still feel from today’s perspective what a rebel and innovator Beethoven was?”

Patricia Kopatchinskaja “Beethoven’s music transcends the instrument and is orchestral; it makes me believe that I’m playing more than just the piano. When I play it, I turn into a trombone, into violence, despair, loneliness, and more.”

Igor Levit “Dear Ludwig, you titan and creator among humanity! We, the citizens of the free republics, have irrevocably encased you in concrete in our concert halls and on countless recordings as the apex of all monuments. Kneeling before your music, we repeat it like a mantra. Oh you lighthouse that blinds everyone! You were feared, but at long last you are played to death, crowned with laurel, stacked up with the rest in the graveyard of our magnificent past.”

Patricia Kopatchinskaja “When I look at today’s concert scene, it seems that every year we celebrate Beethoven’s anniversary. There is a tendency to treat music as a substitute for whatever the topic is. Beethoven just comes in handy with his messages. ‘All men become brothers.’ Wonderful.

No one can object to that. But a genuine engagement with text and meaning gets blurred – or, in Beethoven’s case, simply drowned out. Performing his music is no substitute for tolerance, for empathy, for truth. To play Beethoven is not enough. I’m not going to save the world with the Ninth.”

Igor Levit

© Felix Broede/Sony Classical

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A WEEKEND WITH PATRICIA KOPATCHINSKAJA AND IGOR LEVIT

Patricia Kopatchinskaja, was born in 1977 in Chişinău in the Republic of Moldova and studied violin and composition in Vienna and Bern.

She received the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award at LUCERNE FESTIVAL in 2002 and was featured here in 2017 as “artiste étoile.”

Equally at home in early music and in the Classical, Romantic, and Modern eras, she devises unusual forms for presenting music, including staged concerts.

Igor Levit, who was born in 1987 in Nizhny-Novgorod in Russia and relocated to Hanover with his family at the age of eight, began his international career in 2005 by garnering no fewer than four prizes at the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv. Among his major projects is the cycle of all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, which he also released on CD in 2019 and for which he was awarded the International Beethoven Prize.

The musical weekends that LUCERNE FESTIVAL has added to its programming in 2020 offer concert events that stand out from the usual pattern. The curators are innovative artistic personalities with the courage to pursue unorthodox concepts. Artists like violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Igor Levit, who have been causing a sensation in today’s scene through their electrifying performances. Both share a propensity to boldly go for the jugular as they arrive at their radical interpretations. “Why play only what we understand and know?” asks Kopatchinskaja. “Better to look ahead and discover something new!” And Levit observes: “The work is sacred, but humans are free.” Both artists are also socially committed, looking beyond the horizon of their own art. Kopatchinskaja takes a stand to combat climate change, while Levit fights against anti-Semitism and supports refugees.

Their weekend together in November 2020 marks the end of the great Beethoven anniversary year, during which the music world has been celebrating the composer’s 250th birthday. These five concerts therefore explore the theme “Beethoven Farewell.” While they are dedicated to his groundbreaking legacy, they also broaden our perspective on what happened post-Beethoven with works by Leoš Janáček, Charles Ives, and György Kurtág, among others.

Fri 20.11.

19.30 St. Karl

KREUTZER SONATA

CHF 60/30 Event no. 20501

Patricia Kopatchinskaja violin

Igor Levit piano Michael Engelhardt narrator

Ensemble of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ALUMNI Leoš Janáček String Quartet No. 1 after Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, arranged for ensemble by Richard Tognetti ca. 18’

Reading from Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Sofia Tolstaya’s Whose Fault? ca. 20’

Márton Illés Én-kör III (I-Circle) for violin and cello ca. 5’

PatKop Die Wut (“The Rage”) for violin and ensemble

The Kreutzer Sonata is Beethovenʼs most famous violin sonata: a work that calls for the highest virtuosity, “scritta in uno stilo molto concertante, quasi come d’un concerto,” as the composer noted on the title page. But this is also a work about emotional extremes: Beethoven’s music is explosive, not bothering to show any consideration for manners. No wonder that this sonata has had a remarkable afterlife in the arts. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy took it up in his novella of the same name. It tells of the rabidly jealous Pozdnyshev, who murders his wife because she has played this “dreadful piece” all too ecstatically with a violinist – as a kind of musical love-making. Tolstoyʼs story, in turn, inspired the Czech composer Leoš Janáček to write a string quartet. At the opening of our special Fall Weekend, all three works will be juxtaposed together. And there’s more: Kopatchinskaja provides new musical commentary with her own score and a composition by the Hungarian Márton Illés. Tolstoy’s wife Sofia also has her say with her novel Whose Fault?, which she wrote as a response to her husband’s novella.

ca. 4’

Ludwig van Beethoven Violin Sonata in A major, Op. 47 Kreutzer Sonata ca. 33’

With friendly support from Berthold Herrmann and Mariann Grawe-Gerber

Sat 21.11.

18.30 KKL Luzern, Concert Hall CHF 120/100/80/70/50/30 Event no. 20502

Igor Levit piano Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 90 ca. 14’

Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101 ca. 22’

Piano Sonata in B-flat major, Op. 106 Hammerklavier Sonata ca. 42’

17.30 Introduction to the concert (in German) by Susanne Stähr KKL Luzern, Auditorium

HAMMERKLAVIER SONATA

“The Hammerklavier Sonata is by far the most demanding of all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas. It really is a borderline experience in terms of manual, physical, and emotional demands,” remarks Igor Levit, who adds: “No other piano work – save perhaps the Diabelli Variations – has so moved, changed, and affected me. Not a day goes by that I do not think about this sonata.”

On the second-to-last evening of his eight-part complete Beethoven cycle, which he has been performing at LUCERNE FESTIVAL since the summer of 2019, Levit will ascend this “Mount Everest” of the piano repertoire. But already on the way there, he will provide us with additional moments of musical bliss. First comes the two-movement Sonata in E minor, Op. 90, whose beguiling rondo keeps circling back with exuberant high spirits, like an endless melodic loop. The Sonata in A major, Op. 101, that follows sounds as if it had already started even before the very first measure. And it reaches far into the future in its vibrant scherzo, which seems to anticipate Schumann’s Davidsbündler marches. “This sonata is simply put a human miracle,” Levit attests.

Sat 21.11.

21.00 Kirchensaal MaiHof

KAFKA FRAGMENTS

CHF 50 Event no. 20503

Ah Young soprano Patricia Kopatchinskaja violin

Bram van Sambeek bassoon

Michael Hersch sapped from me broken for soprano, violin, and bassoon ca. 10’

György Kurtág Kafka Fragments for soprano and violin, Op. 24 ca. 60’

This concert has no intermission

Curt, curter, Kurtág: Hungarian composer György Kurtág, who was born in 1926, is the grandmaster of the small form. This trait also applies to his vocal cycle Kafka Fragments, which lasts approximately one hour.

Here, Kurtág sets to music 40 diary entries and passages from letters by the writer from Prague; most of them are no longer than a Tweet. “Their world, comprising pithy language and phrasings, filled with sadness, despair and humor, subtlety, and so much all at the same time, never let go of me,” Kurtág noted. The result is an extremely condensed miniature music drama that gauges emotional boundaries. It also demands an enormous range of expression from the performers: singing, whispering, and speaking, the soprano bares her soul, while the violinist explores the meaning of the texts with a wide spectrum of playing techniques that span lush sounds and articulations that are closer to noise. The individual pieces seem “almost unconnected with each other,” explains Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and yet they are “like a whole life.” She combines Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments with a new composition by the American composer Michael Hersch: three songs based on texts by Anja Utler.

Sun 22.11.

16.00 KKL Luzern, Concert Hall CHF 120/100/80/70/50/30 Event no. 20504

Igor Levit piano Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Sonata in E major, Op. 109 ca. 19’

Piano Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 110 ca. 20’

Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111

ca. 28’

This concert has no intermission

15.00 Introduction to the concert (in German) by Susanne Stähr KKL Luzern, Auditorium

THE LAST THREE SONATAS

Ludwig van Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas have taken on mythic status. He composed these works when he was already completely deaf, i.e., when he himself could no longer hear what kind of masterpieces he had achieved. In the process, he conceived a music so visionary that it seemed to Richard Wagner like the “key to the mystery of the world.” About the very last sonata in C minor, Thomas Mann wrote in his novel Doktor Faustus that Beethoven had thus taken the entire genre to its endpoint: “It had fulfilled its destiny, reached its goal, beyond which there was no going; cancelling and resolving itself, it had taken its farewell.” It is with this musical legacy that Igor Levit concludes his Beethoven cycle in Lucerne. At the end, a hymn-like chant resounds, radiating ever more ecstatically and liberating us from the entire weight of the earth. “This Beethoven pounces on us, grabs us by the ears, and shakes us to our core,” wrote Christian Wildhagen in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about Levit’s Beethoven interpretations – declaring the pianist a great stroke of fortune for the 2020 Beethoven Year.

Sun 22.11.

19.30 KKL Luzern, Concert Hall

BYE-BYE BEETHOVEN

CHF 90/60/30 Event no. 20505

Members of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA, the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ALUMNI, and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra Patricia Kopatchinskaja

violin, concept, and musical direction Lani Tran-Duc and

Louis Dupras

stage coordination

Ricarda Schnoor lighting Jonas Link video “Bye-Bye Beethoven” A staged concert ca. 75’

Fragments from works by Charles Ives, Joseph Haydn, John Cage, Johann Sebastian Bach, György Kurtág, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, and Pauline Oliveros Ludwig van Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61

This concert has no intermission

With the Beethoven year, Patricia Kopatchinskaja believes, we should also say farewell to some of the petrified rituals of todayʼs concert life. To conclude “Beethoven Farewell,” she presents a staged concert to show what this might look like. Or rather, she presents a music installation, like one you might come across in a museum. “You are left to make an image for yourself and to allow what you have heard, seen, and felt affect you.” But Kopatchinskaja admits: “Maybe this title Bye-Bye Beethoven is provocative. Of course, we don’t want to say goodbye to him. But I want to say goodbye to a business that adores only the old monuments and that is losing its relevance. New music should be our beloved child, whose words we must heed.” She illustrates this belief in her staged concert for this evening, which turns the usual state of affairs upside down. And so, for example, the finale of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, in which the orchestra gradually leaves the stage in the original score, here takes place in reverse: the musicians come in, and the music runs backwards, so to speak.

Carla Schwöbel-Braun – Concert Partner