Chefs
Kent Nagano about the Bayerisches Staatsorchester

What distinguishes the Bayerisches Staatsorchester especially in my opinion? For me, it is the mixture of dark, warm sound, transparent texture, individual timbre and a distinct common identity that has been continuously built up and developed over five centuries, strongly influenced by the great composers and artists associated with this house. This combination of klang and personality, which has been constantly renewed, though the flexibility, technical capacity and energy of each new generation is unique, and in the best sense a counter phenomenon to certain trends emerging from our information age.

In its 500-year history, this great ensemble has shared the priceless gift of humanism with the world, and thus it will continue to be relevant in the future. Thank you, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, and happy birthday!

Kent Nagano
General Music Director 2006–2013


Photo credit: Wilfried Hösl


Chefs
Kirill Petrenko about the Bayerisches Staatsorchester

The seven years I was privileged to spend with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester as its principal conductor are but a breath in the light of its long history. But for me, these seven years as Bavarian Music Director have been an unspeakably happy time. I hope that together we have been able to leave some traces that will outlast our own work. As the Bayerisches Staatsorchester has undertaken so many new things in the five hundredth year of its existence, this event becomes less a retrospective of a glorious past than an outlook on a far-reaching and radiant future. I wish this wonderful orchestra that with all my heart – and I am very happy that we will meet again in its anniversary year.

Kirill Petrenko
General Music Director 2013–2021
Honorary Conductor of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester


Photo credit: Wilfried Hösl


Lesestücke
One for all und all for one
We should not forget that with music-making, too, the truth is to be found “on the field”. The individuals who make up the team must learn to submit to a single figu-re. At least for as long as the music is still playing.

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A brief look back at the rich history of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester reveals an orchestra that is more than the sum of its parts.


Holger Noltze


The slogan “One for all and all for one” may initially remind us of football but it is in fact taken from Alexandre Dumas’ timeless novel The Three Musketeers, which was written before the invention of football as a sport. These words express the individual’s unconditional commitment to the collective and his (or her) willingness to subordinate the particular to the general. This beautiful idea can be applied with arguably even greater justification to music-making as part of an ensemble. In football it is ultimately only the goals that count, so everything depends on the player who scores those goals. Fencing, too, could be said to be first and fore-most a solo discipline. But making music together involves a deeper truth: indivi-dual excellence must be acknowledged as part of a greater whole. Players must be able to listen and, where necessary, step back from the limelight. It is this abili-ty that marks out the true artist within the collective. Indeed, it is this that decides the quality of a body of musicians – not that this precludes either the appeal or the principle of contrapuntal polyphony. This principle has always been a promi-nent feature of the long and glorious history of what is now the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, formerly known as the Munich Hofkapelle and, five hundred years ago, as the Munich Kantorei. The appointment of that brilliant master of polyphony, Ludwig Senfl, as musicus intonator in 1523 marks the beginning of one of the world’s longest orchestral histories. Although Duke Albrecht V may have had a reputation as a man who suffered from melancholia, it was his artistic un-derstanding and farsightedness that inspired him to appoint the cosmopolitan Flemish composer Roland de Lassus – known in Italian as Orlando di Lasso – as tenor secundus at his court in 1556. By 1563 Lasso was the maestro della musica di camera and the Kantorei’s principal composer. As the master of a new vocal and instrumental style of composition, he opened up the prospect of a new sym-phonic approach to music that still lay far in the future. In short, there is a long line linking this period with Wagner’s ideal of the sort of sonorities that are found in his later music dramas. The Munich Hofkapelle has had the honour of premiering not only Mozart’s Idomeneo but also Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – a work that changed the course of musical history – and his Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
But the orchestra was also instrumental in bringing about a shift in attitudes to middle-class culture. The Academy Concerts that were established to promote symphonic music date back to 1811. Over two centuries later, the orchestra is still organizing these concerts. After all, the players are able to perform not only ope-ras. They began with a symphony in D major by an as yet relatively little-known composer by the name of Beethoven. The list of the conductors – some of them among the greatest practitioners of their art – who have headed this special and long-standing artists’ collective, which since 1918 has been known as the Bayeri-sches Staatsorchester, is a lengthy one and extends from Franz Lachner, Hans von Bülow, Hermann Levi and Richard Strauss to Bruno Walter, Hans Knapperts-busch, Georg Solti, Rudolf Kempe, Joseph Keilberth, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, Kirill Petrenko and, most recently, Vladimir Jurowski: an almost intimidating roll of honour stretching back over five centuries and starting out with Orlando di Lasso.
A further long-standing aspect of the orchestra’s activities has been its travels in the form of extended tours across Europe and to Asia. Its special interplay of venerable tradition and its desire to embrace the new may be heard in the world’s great centres of music, including Carnegie Hall, the Elbphilharmonie and Lucer-ne’s Culture and Congress Centre. For the eighth year in a row and the tenth time in all, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester has recently been named "Orchestra of the Year“ in a poll conducted among fifty international music critics for Opernwelt magazine. It is no surprise, therefore, that the orchestra has sought to document its successful performances on its own label, Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings. Its very first releases were showered with prestigious prizes, including no fewer than four Gramophone Awards. Its work in preserving the past through the medi-um of recordings has met with an entirely positive response.
We should not forget that with music-making, too, the truth is to be found “on the field”. The individuals who make up the team must learn to submit to a single figu-re. At least for as long as the music is still playing.

Chefs
Orlando di Lasso
https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/de/artwork/ma4d3KgGrO

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With Orlando di Lasso, Duke Albrecht V engaged what is probably the most important musician of his time. From 1562/63 he was the court music director, taking over the management of the table and chamber music as well as the musical arrangement of the services. The Duke enjoys close contact with his musicians and spends a lot of money on them. The Bavarian court is looking for the best singers and instrumentalists throughout Europe. At the wedding of the heir to the throne Wilhelm V in 1568, visitors raved about the artistic interplay and varied repertoire of the court orchestra.


Photo credit: Deutsch, Bildnis des Orlando di Lasso, 1580, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, URL: https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/de/artwork/ma4d3KgGrO

Chefs
Zubin Mehta about the Bayerisches Staatsorchester

With most of the orchestras I conduct these days, I am half the age of these bodies. Fortunately, I can’t say that about the Bayerisches Staatsorchester. So I wish my colleagues and all their predecessors nothing but the best on their 500th birthday! My eight years with this great ensemble have been a highlight of my career, and I can’t tell you how many wonderful memories I have in both symphony and opera: our European tour with the Mahler Three; the Bruckner Eight; the trip to Kashmir and Mumbai; the Don Carlo production with Jürgen Rose; as well as the two Ring productions I was privileged to conduct, will remain forever in my heart.

Great musicians were and are gathered in the Bayerisches Staatsorchester to whom I tip my hat in admiration. I can only end these words of homage this way: Ladies and gentlemen of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, I love and adore each and every one of you all and cannot wait to make music with you again. In deep friendship and admiration

Zubin Mehta
General Music Director 1998–2006
Honorary Conductor of the Bavarian State Orchestra

Photo credit: Wilfried Hösl

The value of variety

The Bayerisches Staatsorchester is remarkable for its fascinatingly varied reper-tory, its multifarious forms of artistic expression and its multiple activities.

Ruth Renée Reif

“Fear! … a deep-seated sense of fear and, time and again, the question as to how the various orchestral departments will survive and what effect it will have on their nerves when the timpani launch an assault on the violas and double basses?” This was Gerd Albrecht’s anxious question when conducting Aribert Reimann’s Lear. But then came the surprising answer: the Bayerisches Staatsorchester accepted this music in a characteristic spirit of professionalism and impassioned commit-ment. It knows how to deal with the problem that arises when the flutes are asked to negotiate keenly strident intervals while accompanying a shimmering pianissi-mo in the violins and violas and a tintinnabulation of jingles, cymbals and a triangle and trumpets add their fanfares not only in the orchestra pit but also in the audi-torium. Always willing to confront the unfamiliar and the new, the orchestra casts its spell on its audiences with its mystical sounds and ecstatic highs, while also captivating them with ist subtle delicacy and lyric enchantment. It revels in Ro-mantic melodies but retains the ability to explore a world of rhythmic brutality and austerity, indulging in beautiful sounds, paying tribute to the spirit of virtuosity and to a universe of noise and inviting audiences to immerse themselves in worlds of sound that allow it to function as a psychological sounding board.
The operatic repertory of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester is characterized by its variety. Every evening there is a different work from a different period on its schedule. And the orchestra has the ability to bring every composition to life and to transform music that was written only yesterday – or several centuries ago – into joy, sadness and tragedy. It is with openness and inquisitiveness that it rises to the challenge of exchanging its modern instruments for their Baroque equiva-lent and following the conductor not on his or her podium but seated at a harpsi-chord. Its players study old scores and are happy to try out novel performance techniques. It is with sheer bravura that it returns to a period that it helped to shape centuries ago, when the singers onstage fought sea monsters or the enti-re stage, including its performers and dancers, was relocated to a raft on the River Isar so that a spectacular sea battle could be enacted there.
Past experiences live on, leaving their mark on the players and overwriting their history in the manner of a palimpsest, while leaving btraces of earlier layers. Nothing is ever completely forgotten. Just as something is invariably left over from every good relationship, so each experience leaves behind a residue that continues to exist in unseen ways, emerging only when it is required to do so. Their exploration of so many different musical landscapes creates a variety that pushes back the horizon even further. Just as the orchestra’s engagement with Classical and Romantic works makes it easier for its players to understand indivi-dual styles on the cusp of tonality and beyond, so their work on contemporary scores allows them to take a fresh look at the classics.
The variety of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester is also reflected in the range and depth of its programmes as well as in the manifold forms that its activities take, activities that it invariably pursues with passion. When Octavian presents a silver rose to Sophie, this scene is accompanied not only by radiant harmonies on a celesta, two harps and a glockenspiel, turning this moment into an event of the highest order, the score’s complex rhythms and kinetic textures extend beyond the performers’ voices and envelop the rose in an aura of elaborate intervals and ingenious turns of phrase. Dance theatre also represents a significant field of activity for the orchestra, and just as its operatic repertory extends from the Baroque to the great Romantic works and the present day, so it accompanies the entire range of choreographic works for the theatre, opening up a vast panorama that extends from dance episodes from the Baroque to the classical ballets of the nineteenth century, the works that were created in the twentieth century and projects involving the contemporary avant-garde.
The prospect of being able to work on projects that no other house can attempt draws international choreographers to Munich’s Nationaltheater. “Here we can play music that demands a great and outstanding orchestra,” says choreographer Jörg Mannes in the context of his adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And so Ariel can chase the stranded seafarers over the stage as dogs, jackals and tigers, while jagged intervals rise up out of the crowded orchestra pit. The fact that the orchestra is an equal partner in ballet performances is underscored by the work of choreographers in which the dancers visualize the music. While the orchestra performs works from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries, the dancers respond by adopting the appropriate dance idioms. And so the enchantment associated with mystery is cast over the stage when the dancers respond to a musical explosion in the pit with expressive concentration.
Finally, whenever the Bayerisches Staatsorchester invites audiences to its Academy Concerts, the Nationaltheater is transformed into what Wolfgang Sa-wallisch is once called “Munich’s most beautiful concert hall”. On these occasions the orchestra is literally centre-stage. These concerts, which are now a local in-stitution, can be traced back to a time when a major concert was held every Wed-nesday at Nymphenburg. The symphonic repertory that has been performed throughout these years is correspondingly vast and varied. And new works are added each year, in many cases commissions by the Bayerische Staatsoper that are receiving their first performances.
But it is the chamber concerts that cover the greatest historical range, a circum-stance due in part to the fact that the Bayerisches Staatsorchester was originally a chamber ensemble and in part because its members explore the whole spect-rum of music at their chamber concerts, taking a particular interest in the period from the early twentieth century to the present day but also going back in time to the Baroque and the Renaissance. They also engage with remote corners of the repertory and enjoy experimentation. In this way they have sought to establish connections with other arts, including literature, and with other cultures, including Far Eastern sounds and African polyrhythms. Every department of the orchestra takes part in these activities, exploring traditional chamber formations such as the string quartet and the piano trio but also investigating other resources, inclu-ding flute, oboe, english horn, clarinet and bassoon or flute and percussion or oboe, bass clarinet and piano. Nor do they shy away from novel performance techniques, holding their string instruments as they would hold a guitar, for exa-mple.
This range culminates each year in the Munich Opera Festival, when the Bayeri-sches Staatsorchester is challenged in the whole range of its activities from an opera and ballet orchestra to concerts that are a part of its Academy Concert series, specially mounted Festival concerts and chamber recitals.
Yet the most valuable tool in this varied arsenal is the people who over the centu-ries have breathed life into this ensemble and who have allowed it to grow artisti-cally. Evening after evening the individual members of the orchestra contribute to its profile and to ist brilliant success with their own cultural background, their indi-vidual life stories, their abilities and their experience. The creativity, commitment and talents of the musicians in the pit and on the podium have resulted in the strength that has kept this wonderful orchestra alive through wars, political uphe-avals, fires and the repeated loss of its instruments. It is this strength that also guarantees the orchestra’s future.

Neujahrswünsche von Hans Knappertsbusch

Photo creddit: Archiv der Musikalischen Akademie


 

Termine
So 08.01.23
Vladimir Jurowski
3. Akademiekonzert 2022/23
Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings veröffentlicht hatte, folgt jetzt die Uraufführung einer Auftragskomposition bei dem australischen Komponisten: Nocturnes and Night Rides. Mit den diesjährigen Münchner Opernfestspielen kommt außerdem seine Oper Hamlet auf die Bühne des Nationaltheaters. 

Zum Termin

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Als „Akademien“ wurden schon im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (oft privat organisierte) Konzerte bezeichnet. Der Münchner Verein Musikalische Akademie e. V. wurde 1811 aus der Mitte des damaligen Hofopernorchesters gegründet. Damit etablierten die Musiker die erste symphonische Konzertreihe Münchens.

Anders als beim Festakt enthält das Programm des 3. Akademiekonzertes ein zweichörig komponiertes Instrumentalwerk des venezianischen Komponisten Giovanni Gabrieli, der in München bei Orlando di Lasso studierte und als Schlüsselfigur an der Schwelle von Renaissance- zu Barockmusik später selbst Komponistengrößen wie Heinrich Schütz unterrichten sollte.

Das Bayerische Staatsorchester erhält nicht nur die großen Werke der letzten Jahrhunderte am Leben, sondern fühlt sich auch der Neuen Musik verpflichtet: Nachdem es unter seinem Generalmusikdirektor Vladimir Jurowski 2020 bereits sehr erfolgreich Brett Deans Testament aufgeführt und im hauseigenen CD-Label Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings veröffentlicht hatte, folgt jetzt die Uraufführung einer Auftragskomposition bei dem australischen Komponisten: Nocturnes and Night Rides. Mit den diesjährigen Münchner Opernfestspielen kommt außerdem seine Oper Hamlet auf die Bühne des Nationaltheaters. 

Zum Termin

Chefs
Ludwig Senfl
weiterführende Informationen zu Ludwig Senfl


Location: München, Staatliche Münzsammlung

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Born in Basel or Zurich around 1490, Ludwig Senfl was probably active as a choirboy in Maximilian I’s chapel during his childhood. Presumably he completed his studies at the University of Vienna as part of an imperial scholarship as well as training as a clergyman. Senfl worked in the imperial chapel until 1520, and in 1523 he was given a permanent position by Duke Wilhelm IV in Munich, where he lived until his death in 1523. His extensive oeuvre includes sacred and secular compositions, such as masses, a large number of cycles of props, motets and songs. He maintained contacts with humanistic and Protestant circles and corresponded with Martin Luther, among others, to whom he also regularly sent compositions. Luther wrote to Senfl from Veste Coburg in 1530: “Love [of music] has also given me hope that my letter will not pose any danger to you … I really praise your Dukes of Bavaria, even if they are not in the least inclined towards me, and respect them above others for the way they promote and nurture music.”
Senfl’s immense esteem as a composer endured well after his death, as evidenced by the wide distribution and number of transmissions of his works. Since 2015, musicologists have been working on the New Senfl Edition, a new complete edition of all of Senfl’s compositions.


Hier finden Sie weiterführende Informationen zu Ludwig Senfl


Location: München, Staatliche Münzsammlung

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