Musical Belongings IV
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| 16 € / reduced 8 € |
| 6 pm: Introduction |
| Duration: 90 min |
| No language skills required |
| Ground Floor, Hall 2 |
| Part of: Musical Belongings |
In the MUSICAL BELONGINGS series, lautten compagney Berlin welcomes a legend of Punta Rock in September 2024: Pen Cayetano and his Turtle Shell Band, ambassadors of the Garífuna culture from Belize. The ballad opera “Polly” by Johann Christoph Pepusch and John Gay was written in 1729 as a sequel to “The Beggar’s Opera”, which had been celebrated as a sensation in London in 1728. Due to political turmoil, however, it was not premiered until 1777. In this opera, a colourful 18th century London society is projected to the Caribbean, the so-called West Indies, whose name testifies to the ignorance of the European colonizers, who thought this Caribbean archipelago was part of India.
This English ballad opera also features so-called “Indian” characters such as Pohetohee and Cawwawkee as well as various pirates who meet “Polly Peachum”. These exotic projections are contrasted with original music from the Caribbean, in particular the Punta, an Afro-indigenous dance form practiced by the Garífuna in the Antilles.
The audience discussion deals with European projections onto the Caribbean and explores the musical traditions of the Garífuna, who came to Honduras in 1797. The probably most famous Punta song “Sopa de Caracol” will be arranged for this programme for old European instruments and typical Punta percussion instruments (turtle bells, Garífuna drums, shekere, congas).
Trailer Musical Belongings II
The lautten compagney BERLIN under the direction of Wolfgang Katschner is one of the most renowned early music orchestras. In the 39 years since its founding in 1984, it has delighted music lovers all over the world. In autumn 2019, it was awarded the OPUS Klassik as Ensemble of the Year. It sets unique musical accents with concerts, opera performances and crossover projects. The ensemble is one of the few independent producers of music theatre projects in Germany. For its unusual and innovative programmes, it is appreciated by audiences as well as national and international critics. In addition to its performances in Berlin, the lautten compagney tours Germany, Europe and the world with about 100 concerts a year. The last major non-European tours took them to ten cities in China in 2019 and to Bogotá in Colombia in autumn 2021. The lautten compagney recently performed the acclaimed premiere of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” at the Semperoper in Dresden, the first guest ensemble to do so in the opera house’s recent history.
The lautten compagney cultivates musical traditions as an important part of its programme spectrum with great repertoire works. Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble are not only curious about music, but also about new ways of presenting it in concert. The lautten compagney has found its own individual platform for experimentation with the :lounge format, among others. Here it demonstrates that early music and contemporary music can indeed be combined. In the :lounge, live sampling and sounds enrich the timbres of the baroque instruments and offer space for surprising improvisations. When old works are inspired by new ideas in this way, musical boundaries disappear.
lautten compagney BERLIN – YouTube
A lutenist by training, Wolfgang Katschner founded the lautten compagney BERLIN together with Hans-Werner Apel in 1984, the centrepiece of his multifaceted work as a musician, organiser and researcher in the sound worlds of “early music”.
On CDs, Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble present themselves as border crossers; alongside world premiere recordings of operas such as “Didone abbandonata” are unusual combinations of composers: Philipp Glass and Tarquinio Merula (“Timeless”), Heinrich Schütz and Friedrich Hollaender (“War & Peace”) and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Astor Piazzolla (“Misterio”). Each of these programmes stands for the conviction that “early” music is just as modern as music written later and, once one steps out of one’s self-imposed isolation as a musician of “early” music, can be combined with modern repertoire in an extremely profitable way for musicians and audiences alike.
For some years now, Wolfgang Katschner has also been successfully appearing as a guest conductor at German opera houses. In 2012-2016 he was musical director of the Winter in Schwetzingen; after guest appearances in Bonn (Handel’s “Rinaldo” and “Giulio Cesare”) and Oldenburg (Hasse’s “Siroe”), he was responsible for several opera productions at the Nuremberg State Theatre: “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria”, “Serse”, “La Calisto” and “Bajazet”. Most recently, Katschner conducted Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” at the Semperoper Dresden.
Wolfgang Katschner is also increasingly involved in the training of young artists. He was a guest professor at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin, at the Sing-Fest in Hong Kong, artist in residence at BarockVokal in Mainz and worked with singers at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar in 2018 and 2019.
Christian Filips is a poet, music dramaturge, director and translator. He studied philosophy, literature and musicology in Vienna and Berlin. Since 2006 he has been working as a freelance author, director and music dramaturge for the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, for the lautten compagney BERLIN and for the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, among others. As a music dramaturge, he specializes in hybrid formats combining early and contemporary music, literature, performance and action art. As a theater maker, he has developed immersive productions for urban space together with partners in Mumbai and Nairobi. As a translator, he collaborated with the Arab-German collective WIESE (Wie es ist) / مرج (for Hamburger Bahnhof, among others). Filips is currently working with poets Logan February (Nigeria) and Lionel Fogarty (Australia) on the project POESIE DEKOLONIE with Engeler Verlag. The first volume published was “Mental Voodoo: Gedichte“ by Logan February. In April 2023 he curated the festival for world literature POETICA 8 at the University of Cologne. In August 2023, he received the Erlangen Literature Prize for Poetry in Translation. Most recently, the poetry collection Im Traum die Auskunft sagt: Hier! Selected poems 1996-2022 was published by Engeler Verlag.