Forwad-Festival: Schumannliebe 5

Schumann was “almost always at the center for me,” says Heinz Holliger. The same holds for Friedrich Hölderlin, another artist marked by crisis whom society labeled “mentally ill.” For Holliger, however, neither was mad in the least. “Rather, they were visionary. They simply had far more antennae.” In his Gesänge der Frühe, he takes up Schumann’s late piano cycle of the same name and combines it with poems, diary entries, and letters by Hölderlin, as well as the autopsy reports of the two artists, to create an unsettling psychogram. Aribert Reimann, who died in 2024, in turn was a distant relative of the psychiatrist then treating Schumann and inherited the composer’s medical records from the psychiatric hospital in Bonn-Endenich — and in an orchestral work, he grappled with Schumann’s final phase of life. Also included are orchestral versions that Holliger made of three solo pieces by György Kurtág — a tribute to Kurtág on his 100th birthday. The program includes an original Schumann work as well: Nachtlied (“Night Song”), which Holliger draws on in his Gesänge der Frühe, evokes the threatening side of night before sleep draws its “protective circle.”

Performers:
Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)
SWR Radio Choir
Heinz Holliger, conductor

Program:
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Nachtlied for chorus and orchestra, Op. 108

Aribert Reimann (1936–2024)
Seven Fragments for orchestra in memoriam Robert Schumann

György Kurtág (*1926) / Heinz Holliger (*1939)
Three Little Pieces for large orchestra, orchestral transcriptions of the pieces … for Heinz …, In memoriam Anna Holliger and Anna Holliger in memoriam
world premiere

Heinz Holliger (*1939)
Gesänge der Frühe after Schumann and Hölderlin for chorus, orchestra, and tape

Tickets as from 4.8. | 10:00 am (CET)