After two years of cancellations, the 35th Wien Modern Festival of New Music begins this Saturday in Vienna.
The Wien Modern is considered one of the world’s leading festivals for new music. After cancellations in 2020 and 2021, the 35th edition of the festival will be held in the Austrian capital from 29 October to 30 November.
Wien Modern was founded in 1988 on the initiative of the late Italian conductor and then Director General of Music of the City of Vienna, Claudio Abbado. Originally, the aim was to “transform” Vienna, a city steeped in tradition, and to bring great masterpieces of the 20th century to the great halls of the city. In 1988, as the festival’s first artistic director, Abbado himself took over the Vienna Philharmonic and, with performances of works by Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Wolfgang Rihm, György Ligeti and Alban Berg, he succeeded in gradually familiarising Viennese audiences with new music.
Today, Wien Modern offers a constantly growing musical diversity as a platform open to contrasting aesthetics and formats. Its last edition so far, in 2019, broke its record for world premieres, with 109 first performances, in venues as diverse as the Great Hall of the Wiener Konzerthaus and its almost 2,000 seats, or the reduced basement of the Café Korb, passing through the Kunsthistorisches Museum or the Naturhistorisches Museum, offering concerts as well as musical theatre, dance shows, visual arts, film, video, performance, installations, improvisation and other unusual formats.
This Saturday, 29 October, the opening concert will take place in the Great Hall of the Wiener Konzerthaus, with the German Matthias Pintscher conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in a programme consisting of Tableau (1988-1989) by Helmut Lachenmann, Stele op. 33 (1994) by György Kurtág, Der Zorn Gottes (2019) by Sofiya Gubaidúlina and his own composition, Assonanza, composed by Pintscher in 2021. Among the highlights of this edition are works that had already been programmed in the cancelled editions of 2020 and 2021, such as Ceremony II by Georg Friedrich Haas, for 75 instruments and more than four hours long. It will also be possible to attend Heiner Goebbels’ most recent work, A House of Call. My Imaginary Notebook, or listen to the entirety of Olga Neuwirth’s enormous coronAtion I-VI, nearly ten hours long, composed during the 249-day concert ban due to the covid-19 pandemic.
Within the festival there is even a sub-festival curated by the German artist Georg Baselitz, to be held from 14 to 17 November, with works by Morton Feldman, Beat Furrer, Sivan Eldar, Georg Friedrich Haas, Elisabeth Harnik, Rebecca Saunders and Olga Neuwirth, with a work composed in 2021 and titled precisely Georg Baselitz, with a text written by the artist himself.
In total, 57 world premieres will be given by composers such as Georges Aperghis, Marin Escande, Georg Friedrich Haas, Peter Jakober, Yoko Miura, Isabel Mundry, Olga Neuwirth, Christof Ressi, Katharina Rosenberger, Susanne Schuda or Lukas Thöni, the Mexican Angélica Castelló – with the world premiere of her musical theatre work Red Rooms, with a libretto by Ximena Escalante, Miguel Ángel Gaspar and Angélica Castelló herself, inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ installations Red Room (Child) and Red Room (Parents), a kind of psychoanalysis of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf and toxic family clans – or the Spanish Alberto Posadas – with the world premiere of Ubi Sunt, for twenty-four a cappella voices in double choir – and Alberto Carretero – with the world premiere of his video opera Renacer, with libretto by Francisco Deco, financed in 2021 with one of the Leonardo grants from the BBVA Foundation -, among many other names.