CANCELLED: NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester / Barnatan / Gilbert

For its closing concert, the festival »Elbphilharmonie Visions« once again has its finger on the pulse of our time: chief conductor and festival initiator Alan Gilbert wields his baton over the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in the first performance of a new work by Lisa Streich. The 35-year-old Swedish composer wrote the piece to a commission from the Hamburg Claussen-Simon Foundation, whose composition prize she has been awarded under the auspices of the festival. In the rest of the concert, Gilbert presents spirited music by his fellow Americans Michael Gordon and John Adams.

Born in Sweden in 1985, Lisa Streich writes music that is strongly sensuous and really sucks the listener in. It doesn’t cramp him with programmatic headings, yet it still evolves an intense expression that has immediate appeal. This is music that focuses on essentials. Alan Gilbert and his musicians thought so too when they tried out pieces written by several candidates: Lisa Streich was unanimously voted the winner of the newly-created composition prize, which goes hand-in-hand with a first performance at »Elbphilharmonie Visions«.

»Does the Devil have to have all the good tunes?«, John Adams asks in the title of his latest piano concerto, which had its premiere in Los Angeles in 2019. »It’s true: the ›devil‹ John Adams still uses the same tricks« - thus the Los Angeles Times, reviewing the concert. »But what a devil he is! And what tricks he uses!« In a kind of funky dance of death, Adams throws himself into the hectic bustle of a modern city with driving rhythms, seductive shreds of pop music and commentaries from an out-of-tune honky-tonk piano. Bombing through a metropolis like Los Angeles at top speed (only in a musical and metaphoric sense of course) was also Michael Gordon’s declared aim. His work »Dystopia« was first performed in 2008 in the city it portrays, and can now be heard at full throttle in Hamburg too.