This won’t be the first time that the NDR Bigband engages with musical ideas from the Baroque period – but their approach to the Baroque music is new in each case. What else is new this year? Well, the pianist Florian Weber, who is now a permanent member of the NDR Bigband and who, as the main soloist, follows in the footsteps of Handel, Telemann and their contemporaries.
Performers
NDR Bigband
Florian Weber piano
direction Geir Lysne
Jazz meets baroque :About the »Big Baroque« programme
Jazz and the music of the Baroque have a few things in common: you’ll find the alternation between solo and tutti passages in the Baroque concerto grosso and in every jazz big band, and the sketch-like notation of the basso continuo as a foundation for solo-led melodic voices, which are also often spontaneously modified, could have been copied directly from the Real Book, the compilation of jazz standards.
Combined to create something new
In his recreations of the classical art music of past epochs, Geir Lysne, the musical director of the NDR Bigband, places great importance on not mixing the various levels. Rather than seeking to blur the edges of old and new, what he does is combine elements of the ancient and the modern in a way that allows something completely new to emerge.
From more or less popular Baroque models, Lysne isolates sounds, motifs and rhythms, which he then processes and allows to emerge with new freshness in the context of the sounds and styles of today. Remnants of the Baroque material still shimmer through the new sound, but, in the rework by the NDR Bigband, their emotionality and message have changed just as radically as the world since they were originally written.
A new pianist
With pianist Florian Weber succeeding Vladislav Sendecki, the NDR Bigband has appointed another virtuoso with an outstanding international reputation in both European art music and jazz. Raised in a family of classical musicians, given a solid grounding in both classical and jazz, and having pursued a career in both fields right to the present, the multi-award-winning virtuoso and composer has now made jazz his primary working field.
