NDR Vokalensemble / Leif Ove Andsnes

»Via Crucis«

This concert has already taken place! 12 | 18 | 27 | 37 | 49
This concert has already taken place! 12 | 18 | 27 | 37 | 49
Leif Ove Andsnes
Leif Ove Andsnes © Oezguer Albayrak
NDR Vokalensemble
NDR Vokalensemble © Marius Engels / NDR
  • Doors open 17:00

  • Start 18:00

  • End ca. 19:30

Rugged beauty

Towards the end of his life Franz Liszt, the great Romantic composer and creator of the onomatopoeic symphonic poem, risked a change of course. He reduced his style to the essentials and wrote works of austere beauty. The composition of the cantata »Via Crucis« astonished even his contemporaries, with his almost-wife Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein commenting: »One has the feeling that he has left the world’s highest peak in order to swim in ethereal blue.«

With »Via Crucis«, Liszt depicts the fourteen Stations of the Cross, allocating texts from the Western liturgy to each one: Gregorian chorales and verses from the Stabat Mater as well as arrangements of Lutheran hymns. Liszt wrote concentrated harmonies that push at the envelope of tonality, and otherwise abandons himself entirely to the expressiveness of the human voice and of a keyboard instrument.
Instead of the organ setting, Grete Pedersen chooses to play the work on the piano, thus emphasising the simple progressiveness of this late piece. The Norwegian conductor, whose recordings have already won all major international awards from the Diapason dʼOr to the Gramophone Award, also breaks open the framework of the cantata and inserts works by other composers.

Performers

NDR Vokalensemble

Leif Ove Andsnes piano

conductor Grete Pedersen

Programme

Franz Liszt
Via Crucis / Les 14 stations de la croix S 504a

Edvard Grieg
Vier Psalmen op. 74 (Auszüge)

Franz Schubert
Psalm 23 D 706 »Gott ist mein Hirt«

Iannis Xenakis
Nuits / Sumerische, assyrische, achäische und andere Phoneme

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