Sun, Dec. 18, 2022, 11.00 am | Elbphilharmonie, Grand Hall
Giya Kancheli: Morning Prayers for chamber orchestra and tape
Alexander Lokshin: Lieder der Margarete. From three scenes from Goethe`s "Faust" for Soprano and chamber orchestra
Gustav Mahler: "Blumine"
Dmitri Schostakovitch: Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10
Conductor: Andrey Boreyko
Soprano: Joanna Freszel
Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg
2021/22 marks Andrey Boreyko’s third season as Music and Artistic Director of Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Their planned engagements this season include performances at the Eufonie Festival, the final and prize winners’ concerts of the 18th Fryderyk Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, and the orchestra’s 120th birthday celebration. They also plan to tour across Poland and the US. Now in his eighth and final season as Music Director of Artis—Naples, Andrey Boreyko’s inspiring leadership has raised the artistic standard of the Naples Philharmonic. Boreyko concludes his tenure as Music Director by continuing to explore connections between art forms through interdisciplinary thematic programming. Significant projects he has led include pairing Ballet Russes-inspired contemporary visual artworks of Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave with performances of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and The Firebird, commissioning a series of compact pieces by composers including Giya Kancheli to pair with an art exhibition featuring small yet personal works by artists such as Picasso and Calder that were created as special gifts for the renowned collector Olga Hirshhorn. Highlights of previous seasons have included major tours with The State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia (to Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich) and the Filarmonica della Scalla (to Ljubljana, Rheingau, Gstaad, and Grafenegg festivals). Guest engagements from recent seasons include Seoul Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Sinfonica Nazionale RAI, Sinfonia Varsovia (with whom he appeared in the Budapest Palace of Arts’ Bridging Europe Festival with Piotr Anderszewski), Salzburg Mozarteum Orchester, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Frankfurt Museumsgesellschaft, Sydney, Toronto, Seattle, Minnesota, San Francisco, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas and Detroit Symphony orchestras. In 2019, he conducted the Cleveland Orchestra
Joanna Freszel was born in Warsaw. Three-time scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture, Pro Polonia programme, ISA2012, awarded with the Magna cum Laude medal (2013), Młoda Polska [Young Poland] scholarship (2014) and Les Orphées d’Or – Prix de la SACD of L’Académie du Disque Lyrique for the best interpretation of contemporary music (2016). Nominated in two categories for the Fryderyk 2016 award for her debut album real life song as well as for the Coryphaeus 2017 award. A Polityka Passport Award winner (2017). In 2020, she received a Coryphaeus award in the category Event of the Year for her participation in the dramma per musica Drach by Aleksander Nowak to the libretto by Szczepan Twardoch. In 2021, she won a Fryderyk award in the category Album of the Year – Oratorio and Opera Music for her recording of the opera ahat-ilī – Sister of Gods by A. Nowak to the words by Olga Tokarczuk.
She has won prizes in such competitions as the Halska Competition, the Szymanowski Competition, the Reszke Competition, Gabor Belvedere, J:opera Voice Competition ISA’12. Finalist of the Viotti Competition.
She has recorded music for films and radio plays. Ms Freszel has participated in such festivals as Premieres, Warsaw Autumn, Aix-en Provence, Contrechamps, Sacrum Profanum, Silesian Quartet and Guests, Saaremaa Opera Days, Opera in the Town Hall Festival, Musica Polonica Nova, Melos-Etos, etc. She works with the Estonian National Opera, the Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera in Warsaw and the Grand Theatre in Poznań.
She has performed as Musetta in La Bohème by Puccini, Vénus and a Phrygian woman in Dardanus by Rameau, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte by Mozart, Marguerite in Faust by Gounod, Machine in Nici [Threads] by Wołek, Susanna in Figaro Gets a Divorce by Langer, Psyche in Eros and Psyche by Różycki, Inanna in ahat-ilī by Nowak, Ellenai in Anhelli by Przybylski, Rosina in The Barber of Seville by Rossini or Hanna in The Haunted Manor by Moniuszko.
She has been invited to cooperate by the following Orchestras: Warsaw Philharmonic, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Białystok, Cracow, Silesian, Świętokrzyska, Szczecin and Zielona Góra Philharmonic Orchestras, Sinfonia Varsovia, Sinfonia Iuventus, Beethoven Academy Orchestra, Lviv, Odesa and Donetsk Orchestras, Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik, Ereprijs, AUKSO, New Music Orchestra and many others. She specialises in contemporary music performance, although she successfully interprets works of all eras.
She has been a guest singer on the albums of, e.g. the Silesian Quartet and of such artists as Ewa Liebchen, Rafał Łuc, Andrzej Karałow or Leszek Długosz.
In 2020, together with Łukasz Chrzęszczyk, she released her second album Śpiewnik polski [A Polish Songbook] (Orphée Classics), and at the end of 2021, together with Bartłomiej Kominek, the album Akwarelle [Aquarelles], which is the first recording of complete songs by Grażyna Bacewicz (DUX).
Joanna Freszel is also the author of educational programmes such as poGŁOSka [HEARsay] and samoŚPIEW [selfSINGING]. They deal with the most interesting phenomena of the contemporary vocal art and voice education. They are available to the general public on the Internet.
She is a Master of Science in Environmental Protection of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. In 2019, she received the title of Doctor of Musical Arts with honours.
The Philharmonic State Orchestra is Hamburg’s largest and oldest orchestra, looking back on many years of musical history. When the “Philharmonic Orchestra” and the “Orchestra of the Hamburg Municipal Theatre” merged in 1934, two tradition-steeped orchestras combined. Philharmonic concerts have been performed in Hamburg since 1828, artists such as Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms being regular guests of the Philharmonic Society. The history of the opera company goes back even further: Hamburg has been home to musical theatre since 1678, even if a regular opera or theatre orchestra was only formed later. To this day, the Philharmonic State Orchestra has embodied the sound of the Hansa City, a concert and opera orchestra in one.
During its long history, the orchestra encountered great artist personalities. Apart from composers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, such as Telemann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Mahler, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, since the 20th century chief conductors such as Karl Muck, Joseph Keilberth, Eugen Jochum, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Horst Stein, Aldo Ceccato, Christoph von Dohnányi, Gerd Albrecht, Ingo Metzmacher and Simone Young have shaped the orchestra’s sound. Renowned conductors of the pre-war era such as Otto Klemperer, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Karl Böhm and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt gave brilliant performances, as did outstanding conductors of our times: suffice it to mention Christian Thielemann, Semyon Bychkov, Kirill Petrenko, Sir Neville Marriner, Valery Gergiev and Sir Roger Norrington.
Starting with the 2015/2016 season, Kent Nagano has taken on the position of Hamburg’s General Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Philharmonic State Orchestra and the Hamburg State Opera. In his first season Kent Nagano initiated a new project, the Philharmonic Academy, focusing on experimentation and chamber music. In 2016 Nagano and the Philharmonic undertook a successful three-week concert tour in South America, a tour of Spain followed in 2019. Since 2017 Kent Nagano and the Philharmonic State Orchestra have continued the traditional Philharmonic Concerts at the new Elbphilharmonie, for which they commissioned Jörg Widmann to compose the oratorio ARCHE, which was given its world premiere during the hall’s opening festivities. The concert recording has been released at ECM.
The Philharmonic State Orchestra offers approximately 35 concerts per season and performs more than 240 performances per year at the Hamburg State Opera and the Hamburg Ballet John Neumeier, making it Hamburg’s busiest orchestra. The stylistic bandwidth covered by the 140 musicians, ranging from historically informed performance practice to contemporary works and including concert, opera and ballet repertoire, is unique throughout Germany. Chamber Music has a long tradition at the Philharmonic State Orchestra: what began in 1929 with a concert series for chamber orchestra has been continued since 1968 by a series of chamber music only.
In 2008 Simone Young and the Philharmonic State Orchestra won the Brahms Award of the Schleswig-Holstein Brahms Society. The orchestra has recorded the complete Ring by Wagner as well as the complete symphonies of Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner – the latter in the rarely-performed original versions – as well as works by Mahler, Hindemith and Berg, and has released DVDs of opera and ballet productions by Hosokawa, Offenbach, Reimann, Auerbach, J.S. Bach, Puccini, Poulenc and Weber.
The members of the Philharmonic State Orchestra feel equally beholden to Hamburg’s musical tradition and responsible for the city’s artistic future. Since 1978 the musicians have been participating in education programmes in Hamburg’s schools. Today, the orchestra maintains a broad education programme, including school and kindergarten visits, patronage for music projects, introductory events for children and family concerts. The orchestra’s own academy prepares young musicians for their professional careers. The Philharmonic’s musicians thereby make an equally enjoyable and valuable contribution to tomorrow’s music education in the music metropolis of Hamburg.
Although esteemed and recognized by great colleagues such as Shostakovich, not least due to his independent musical expressivity and highly sensitive inventiveness, Alexander Lokshin has remained obscure. Hardly anyone knows the name of this composer, who was born in 1920 and left eleven symphonies for posterity, almost all of them based on writings from different cultures. "Margaret’s Songs" were written in 1973; Boris Pasternak had translated Goethe’s text into Russian. At the age of 19, Shostakovich wrote his first symphony – a stroke of genius which brought the composer immediate recognition. This was in the middle of the "Golden Twenties", when the worlds of the West and the Soviet East enjoyed playing with masks and puppets and tales of grotesque, fairy-tale figures. Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Hindemith and many others had shown the way.
Introduction
60 minutes before the concert, there will be a pre-concert talk (in german)
Cildren`s Program
Age 4-8 Spielplatz Orchester
Age 9-12 Konzertbesuch and Kinderkünstlergespräch
Venue: Elbphilharmonie, Grand Hall, Platz der Deutschen Einheit 4, 20457 Hamburg
Prices: € 65,00 / 52,00 / 41,00 / 28,00 / 12,00
