Salzgitter
The twenties of the last century are, in retrospect, regarded as an immensely intense period in a politically and economically challenging situation. The English and French terms “Roaring Twenties” and “Années folles” capture further facets of this decade, whose diversity is portrayed in this recital program. For example, one can relive the spirit of the youth of the time in Poulenc’s “Hôtel” (“Je ne veux pas travailler, je veux fumer” – “I don’t want to work, I want to smoke”) or experience Dadaism in sung form in Satie’s “Ludions,” while Roger Quilter is a representative of English national music. The political currents of the society of that time repeatedly emerge in the song texts and the composers’ biographies. While Hans Pfitzner was revered by conservatives before the Third Reich as a nationally minded German composer and expressed anti-modernist and antisemitic views in his writings, in Nazi Germany he was only a marginal figure. Erich Wolfgang Korngold also did not compose in a modern style, but had to leave Austria in 1938. Hanns Eisler composed his randomly found “newspaper clippings” as a protest against bourgeois concert lyricism and as an expression of the working class, which often lived precariously in the large cities. Monika Abel and Kathrin Isabelle Klein, nominated in 2025 for the German Record Critics’ Award, take the audience musically back to this era.
In the program “Viennese Life Storms,” the duo Pianoforte presents two of Vienna’s great composers: Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms — both masters of four-hand piano playing, both deeply connected to the city, both unmistakably distinctive. In the first half, they reveal their cheerful, dance-like side: Brahms with the charming Waltzes, Op. 39, Schubert with the elegant “Valses nobles” and the playfully brilliant Variations, D 603. After the interval, the mood becomes more sombre: Brahms’s Variations, Op. 23, take their starting point from the theme of Robert Schumann’s ghost variations — his final musical thought — and unfold into a sequence of profound intensity. Schubert’s Life Storms finally heighten the tension once more: a dramatic single movement full of inner restlessness and turmoil. Thus the evening spans the arc from dance-like lightness through existential crises back to life, and shows the full range of these two great masters.
When violin and piano meet in a symbiotic dialogue, a space is created for honest, narrative moments. The young duo, consisting of violinist Jakow Pavlenko and pianist Sonja Kowollik, invites the audience not only to hear music, but to experience it as a living process. In their program “Liebesfreud und Liebesleid,” the two weave together well-known miniatures and great sonatas into a panorama of emotional inner worlds - from playful lightness to ardent longing. Jakow Pavlenko, who has already thrilled audiences at the Elbphilharmonie and the Pierre Boulez Hall, and the internationally multiple award-winning Sonja Kowollik are distinguished by the courage to let go in the moment and bring works back to life in their deepest intention. Together, they bring feelings of longing to life and make the composers’ thoughts tangible.
