Good Friday Concert – Earth
Modest Mussorgsky A Night on Bald Mountain (version by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov)
John Adams Dharma at the Big Sur
Gustav Mahler The Song of the Earth
“I wanted to capture the moment, the so-called ‘shock of recognition,’ when one reaches the edge of the continental land mass,” wrote American composer John Adams about his composition Dharma at the Big Sur. The concerto for six-string electric violin and orchestra was written in 2003 for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Big Sur is a 150 km stretch of steep coastline in California, between Carmel-by-the-Sea in the north and San Simeon in the south, which inspired Adams to compose the work. In Kassel, Latvian violinist Roberts Balanas will perform this unique piece with his electric violin alongside the State Orchestra.
No less than life and death are at stake in Gustav Mahler’s The Song of the Earth. The superstitious composer, however, struggled with the work—after all, famous predecessors had died after their respective ninth symphonies. In this piece, Mahler sets texts from Hans Bethge’s poetry collection The Chinese Flute, which together convey the cycle of human life and the awareness of earthly transience.
The concert opens with Modest Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain. According to music journalist Christoph Vratz, the piece is a “soundtrack for getting chills.” In the version by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, alongside the witches’ sabbath and various eerie moments, the hope for redemption and peace also takes on a central role.
Guest conductor Jānis Liepiņš, a native of Riga, makes his debut in Kassel. Since 2019 he has been First Kapellmeister at the National Theatre Mannheim.