Exils - Montpellier Opera house (2025) - Exils - Opéra-Orchestre National de Montpellier (2025)

Description

"In December 1928, Kurt Weill responded to a commission from Frankfurt Radio to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the First World War. Contrary to what its title suggests, his Berliner Requiem (1928) on poems so strong on the war by Bertolt Brecht, is a completely secular cantata. A particular sound color emerges from the whole in the service of the artistic commitment of the two artists, in homage to Rosa Luxembourg, a central figure and pacifist brutally assassinated on January 15, 1919.

This work is compared with Stravinsky's Wind Instrument Symphonies, but also with Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden, and the mysterious and magical cantata Ode to a Nightingale (1985) by Valentin Silvestrov, patriarch of Ukrainian music. This music of suggestion draws with infinite delicacy, by means of fragile and ephemeral sounds, this mixture of nature, landscapes and reflection on destiny sketched by the English poet John Keats whose first verses give the full measure of the work: “In the dark, I listen; yes, more than once I have been almost in love with death.” An event not to be missed which inaugurates an annual event in tribute to artists and composers forced into exile."

More information is available on the official website of the opera house.