BOOK NOW TICKET PRICES: Royal Festival Hall concerts £12 - £58 or £12 - £45 Queen Elizabeth Hall concert £12 - £32 Insights Day £25, or £15 when also booking for 29 Sep concert, and for Philharmonia Friends and Southbank Centre Members HOW TO BOOK: Choose your own seats online at any time, or give us a call Mon - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm Philharmonia Orchestra philharmonia.co.uk (£1.75 transaction fee) Freephone 0800 652 6717 (£2.75 transaction fee) Southbank Centre southbankcentre.co.uk (£3 transaction fee) 020 3879 9555 (£3.50 transaction fee)
MUSIC, FILM AND DRAMA FOR TURBULENT TIMES Germany’s Weimar Republic lasted fewer than 15 years. Created in 1919 in the wake of World War I, and destroyed in 1933 by the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party, this hopeful but fragile country became a political, economic and social disaster. But culturally and intellectually, it was an explosion of invention and creativity. High and low art, violence and sensuality, satire and sentimentality, ugliness and beauty all mingled together. Bizarre new styles of music, painting, theatre and cinema emerged alongside a rich new German literature, while physicists, mathematicians and philosophers busily reordered our understanding of the world. In this colourful series at London’s Southbank Centre, the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen explore the familiar, the unexpected and the downright peculiar, and trace the connections that linked so many of these artists and thinkers so intimately to one another.
BOOK MORE AND SAVE Save 10% with our series discounts when you book for three or more Philharmonia Orchestra concerts in the Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis series. Please note that this applies only when you book through the Philharmonia box office or at philharmonia.co.uk
Explore this exciting series online and in print: Visit philharmonia.co.uk/weimar_berlin throughout the spring to watch a series of films presented by Series Advisor Gavin Plumley about culture, politics and music in Weimar-era Germany. Look out for the series magazine, featuring in-depth content about the series.
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FEATURING: JUNE - SEPTEMBER 2019
MUSIC by Weill, Hindemith and Berg LIVE SCREENING of classic film Metropolis CABARET at Queen Elizabeth Hall TALKS and FREE PERFORMANCES
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN conductor
Sunday 9 June 2019 A whole day of activity across the South Bank, with events at BFI Southbank and Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, culminating in the opening concert, The Sounds of Change.
5pm Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall
FREE PERFORMANCE: THE BRAZEN ROAR
Young players from the Hounslow Music Service and members of the Philharmonia present a performance inspired by themes from the Weimar period.
(FREE, no ticket required) 1.45pm BFI Southbank
INSIGHTS TALK: MUSIC MEETS FILM IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC In Weimar Germany, music was integral to the cinema-going experience: silent films inspired ambitious orchestral scores, while sound-era musicals spawned hit songs for a mass audience. Making use of film clips, Gavin Plumley and Margaret Deriaz, Head of Film Distribution at BFI, will explore the relationship between music and film in Germany of the 1920s and 30s. For prices, see DAY TICKET box*
3.15pm BFI Southbank
SCREENING: THE THREEPENNY OPERA Germany 1931. Dir GW Pabst. With Rudolf Forster, Carola Neher, Lotte Lenya. 112min.
For prices, see DAY TICKET box* Series Partner
INSIGHTS TALK: INTRODUCING THE SERIES Gavin Plumley talks to writer and broadcaster Philipp Blom, author of Fracture: Life and Culture in the West 1918–1938, about the Weimar Republic and its enduring echoes.
(FREE, no ticket required) 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall
CONCERT: THE SOUNDS OF CHANGE Esa-Pekka Salonen conductor Angela Denoke soprano BERG Three Pieces from Wozzeck HINDEMITH Concerto for Orchestra WEILL Suite from The Threepenny Opera SHOSTAKOVICH Revolutionary finale from The Golden Age A snapshot of Germany in the 1920s, in a programme that draws from three hugely successful theatrical works. Shostakovich visited Berlin from the Soviet Union in 1927 and set his ballet The Golden Age in the Weimar Republic. Shostakovich met both Hindemith and Weill during his Berlin trip and declared that Hindemith was his favourite contemporary composer. Hindemith’s virtuosic, muscular Concerto for Orchestra is juxtaposed here with an orchestral suite from Weill’s Threepenny Opera, best known for the song ‘Mack the Knife’. Back in Russia, Shostakovich attended the first Soviet performance of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, and fondly greeted its composer, who had become an international star following the 1925 premiere of the opera in Berlin. Tickets: £12 - £58*
The Day Ticket is available through the Philharmonia box office and website only. Call 0800 652 6717 or visit philharmonia.co.uk/weimar_berlin/day_ticket
PLEASE NOTE: this concert was previously advertised with a different programme. Please call the Philharmonia box office with any queries about the change: 0800 652 6717
Thursday 13 June 2019 6pm Royal Festival Hall
FREE PERFORMANCE: NEW MUSIC FOR OLD MOVIES Titus Engel conductor MARTIN SMOLKA Hats in the Sky (UK premiere); En tractant (UK premiere) Watch two surrealist films from the 1920s – Ghosts before Breakfast and Entr’acte – accompanied by new scores by Czech composer Martin Smolka. Smolka’s music is humorous and playful, often asking orchestral instruments to play in unfamiliar ways.
(FREE, no ticket required)
SCREENING: METROPOLIS, WITH LIVE ORCHESTRA
Monday 23 September 2019 Thursday 26 September 2019
Sunday 29 September 2019
7.30pm Queen Elizabeth Hall
12 noon - 4pm Level 5 Function Room at Royal Festival Hall
CONCERT: TO THE CABARET!
Frank Strobel conductor
Esa-Pekka Salonen conductor Gerard McBurney creative director Dagmar Manzel vocalist Narrator to be announced
HUPPERTZ Metropolis: film screening
with live orchestral accompaniment
Composer Gottfried Huppertz and film director Fritz Lang were frequent partners in the creation of German cinema of the Weimar period. Their most famous collaboration was on Metropolis (1927), Lang’s epic masterpiece of Expressionist science fiction. Set in a city of the future (in 2026), Metropolis imagines a nightmarish mechanized world. Its warnings about society, equality and the nature of the city itself reflect the instability and concerns of the Weimar age. Huppertz’s music draws from Wagner and Richard Strauss, with flashes of modernism to represent its futuristic urban dystopia. FILMPHILHARMONIC EDITION Film by courtesy of Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung Music by courtesy of EUROPEAN FILMPHILHARMONIC INSTITUTE Produced by ZDF/ARTE
Satirical, sentimental, rebellious and subversive, the songs of the cabaret were picked up and exploited by the ‘serious’ composers of the day. In To the Cabaret!, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts music from Kurt Weill to Friedrich Hollaender, who composed some of the greatest cabaret songs in history, including those made famous by Marlene Dietrich. The spirit of the Cabaret is reflected on screen in still and moving images – cartoons and paintings, scraps of films and photographs, and snatches from poems, stories, plays, diaries and letters – transporting us to that brief and uncertain carnival a hundred years ago, a brightly lit interlude between the darkness of two political and human catastrophes. PLEASE NOTE: there is no interval in this performance. It ends at approximately 8.45pm.
PLEASE NOTE: this concert was previously advertised with Esa-Pekka Salonen as the conductor. We are grateful to Frank Strobel for stepping in to conduct this performance.
Tickets: £12 - £32
Tickets: £12 - £58
8.45pm Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer space Image © Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung
GW Pabst’s film version of Brecht and Weill’s celebrated stage hit, the shocking tale of charismatic crime-boss Mack the Knife, who terrorizes Victorian London with help from his Establishment friends. Brecht’s anti-capitalist satire is lent extra edge by Kurt Weill’s incredibly catchy, cabaret- and jazz-inflected score.
6pm Royal Festival Hall
*DAY TICKET Come to all three ticketed events on 9 June at BFI Southbank and Southbank Centre: • Premium: £50 for a seat for BFI talk and screening, and front stalls seat for The Sounds of Change • Standard: £35 for a seat for BFI talk and screening, and rear stalls seat for The Sounds of Change
7.30pm Royal Festival Hall
FREE PERFORMANCE: POST-SHOW CABARET
Raze Collective and Philharmonia Orchestra present a queer extravaganza of contemporary cabaret from across London.
(FREE, no ticket required)
6pm Royal Festival Hall
INSIGHTS TALK: BERG VIOLIN CONCERTO Gavin Plumley is joined by violinist Christian Tetzlaff for a musically-illustrated exploration of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto. (FREE, no ticket required) 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall
CONCERT: ANGELS AND DEMONS Esa-Pekka Salonen conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin HINDEMITH Rag Time (well-tempered) J.S. BACH, arr. SCHOENBERG Two Chorale Preludes BERG Violin Concerto HINDEMITH Symphony: Mathis der Maler Composers, artists and writers were intimately connected in the creative ferment of the Weimar Republic. This riveting programme draws connections between Weimar-era musicians and artists, and their historical forebears. Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus School in 1919, had a daughter – Manon. When she died of polio aged just 18, Alban Berg was spurred to dedicate his new Violin Concerto, with its haunting chorale by JS Bach, ‘to the memory of an angel’. Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter) reaches further back into the past. The symphony is based on the religious tableaux of 16th-century artist Matthias Grünewald. Grünewald’s depictions of suffering and strife, born of the political and social upheaval that followed the Reformation, are translated by Hindemith into a powerful statement on his own turbulent times. Tickets: £12 - £45
INSIGHTS DAY: THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC (1919-33) Find out more about this exciting and dangerous period in the history of Germany, a time of wild experimentation when new movements in music, art, architecture and film flourished. Discussions will be interspersed with live music from Philharmonia players and young artists. Hosted by Gavin Plumley, this session surveys the music of Berg, Hindemith and Weill, as well as the work of the Bauhaus, founded in 1919, and the lure of Berlin for British writers and artists. Tickets: £25, or £15 when also booking for the evening concert, and for Philharmonia Friends and Southbank Centre Members.
7.30pm Royal Festival Hall
CONCERT: THE PARTY’S OVER Esa-Pekka Salonen conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin Rebecca Nelsen soprano BUSONI Two Studies for Doktor Faust WEILL Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra BERG Lulu Suite HINDEMITH Dances from Das Nusch-Nuschi Experimental, radiant, colourful – Kurt Weill’s 1924 Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra bursts with life. Tonight’s soloist is Christian Tetzlaff, “the finest violinist performing before the public today” (New Yorker). Writing his opera Lulu in 1934, Alban Berg was flirting with danger, adapting what the Nazis termed a ‘degenerate’ text and composing in a modernist style. Fearful that the complete opera would never be performed, Berg adapted his luxurious, jazz-infused material into a suite for soprano and orchestra. The bittersweet party atmosphere of the Weimar Republic years was over. But we finish the series with a glance back to the hope and freedom of its early days, a glorious, defiant dance from Paul Hindemith’s one-act opera Das Nusch-Nuschi of 1922. Tickets: £12 - £45
Credits: Esa-Pekka Salonen: Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor Gerard McBurney: Creative Consultant Gavin Plumley: Series Advisor BFI Southbank: Series Partner