A choir named after Beethoven? Admittedly, he didn’t leave behind an extensive choral repertoire. Tristan Meister, director of the Beethoven Choir Ludwigshafen since 2017, set out to explore this question by delving deep into Beethoven’s choral works.
I like to be inspired by greenery, sunlight, or rain.
As a child, I often lost myself in improvising on the piano, inventing music and then immediately forgetting it.
Nana Forte is a Slovenian composer whose music ranges from choral and vocal-instrumental to orchestral and stage works. In this interview, she gives us an insight into her work.
Only in the last few years has Marianna von Martines (1744–1812) finally begun to win the recognition she deserves as an important composer of the eighteenth century. Martines’s synthesis and mastery of both old and new styles is a central theme in her works, and scholars studying her music have pointed it out frequently. It is especially evident in her sacred choral-orchestral works, one of the earliest being the Seconda Messa of 1760.
Georg Frideric Handel is the creator of the English oratorio. When he first staged his Esther as a religious drama without scenic action at the King’s Theatre in London in 1732, it marked the beginning of an unparalleled success story. Opera audiences were so enthusiastic about the new genre that from that time onwards Handel, who was not only a composer but also a theater manager, filled his opera houses with oratorios based on biblical themes. Performances of the Messiah and later of other oratorios too for charitable purposes were one of the central driving forces behind the development of the great music festivals that were held from the early eighteenth century onwards.
I find inspiration in the very concept that humans can create music.
If I only can pick one I do believe I need to pick when I first heard Claude Debussy’s Trois nocturnes for the first time. It was such an eye opener for me. I had never heard music composed in that way before.
I had the chance to prepare the three choruses for Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion at Indiana University when Penderecki himself came to visit in 2017.
In my childhood I was strongly inspired by Debussy’s piano works and also visually by Michio Mamiya’s Score of Piano Sonata No.2, then in and after my late teens by Lachenmann, Ligeti, Kurtag, Webern and Aperghis.
