NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra / Ingo Metzmacher

The former director of the Hamburg Opera Ingo Metzmacher previously took to the Elbphilharmonie’s conductor stand with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra shortly after the grand opening. This time, the works he has selected are like light and shadow: Olivier Messiaen’s »Trois petites liturgies« are songs of praise to God – light and fragile. The composer wrote them in the last, horror-filled years of the Second World War. Yet, despite everything, they still have faith in love and in the divine in man. With the ethereal sounds of the ondes Martenot and a women’s choir, the composer seeks »a glistening music, giving to the aural sense voluptuously refined pleasures«. In contrast, the dark sounds of a male choir and deep bass dominate in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13. Featuring lines by the poet Yevtushenko, the piece was written in remembrance of the massacre of tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar in 1941.