Widmann composer and conductor

SPIEGELZAAL 13.40-14.05 PM - Bas van Putten in conversation with Jörg Widmann


With the Ensemble Modern, Jörg Widmann demonstrates his affinity for music for smaller ensembles - and his enormous stylistic spectrum.

Love and absurdity
Liebeslied is the chamber music counterpart to his orchestral work Teufel Amor. Together they form a diptych about love, which Widmann calls 'paradise and a snake pit'. But where should one place Widmann's quintet? The instrumentation is an homage to Mozart's Quintet in E flat major for piano and wind KV 452, but the form is romantically Schumannian: a chain of instrumental miniatures with titles that are partly fairytale-like, partly quasi-scholarly. Verwunschener Garten stands next to Akkord-Etüde (mit Cantus Firmus) . .. Paradoxical instructions like 'panic, but hesitation' and a Coda that comes well before the end underline the absurdist content of the piece.

Widmann world premiere
In the Freie Stücke, written for the fiftieth birthday of his teacher Wolfgang Rihm: ten short movements full of magical soundscapes in the no man's land between blown air and tone, sometimes at stratospheric heights and in the sixth movement, 'floating slowly', almost as a Ligeti tribute. Air for horn solo is, according to Widmann, a 'nature piece about proximity and distance'. The horn player projects his notes on an open grand piano with the pedal pressed down, making it reverberate liltingly and virtuosically like mountain and valley. The programme concludes with a new ensemble piece, commissioned by the ZaterdagMatinee.


Ticket sales NTR ZaterdagMatinee season 2022-23
From 1 March '22: passe-partouts and series tickets
From 1 June '22: single tickets