Soldiers: concert stream from the Elbphilharmonie

In this concert stream, the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, the Cologne Opera and François-Xavier Roth perform the gigantic opera »Die Soldaten« by Bernd Alois Zimmermann in Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie.

In »Die Soldaten«, Bernd Alois Zimmermann explores his personal experiences during the Second World War and the threats posed to the world by a nuclear catastrophe. He develops a dystopia in a dazzling tonal language that is clearly based on the colours of Impressionism and has lost none of its topicality and significance to the present day. Despite its power, the opera is an intimate chamber play between people, a parable about love and its dark sister, violence, about the abysses of brutality and self-destruction. Today, it is one of the most important music theatre works of the 20th century.

In cooperation with the Cologne Opera, François-Xavier Roth, the Gürzenich Orchestra and Spanish star director Calixto Bieito, who has already staged »Die Soldaten« several times, are now creating a realisation of Zimmermann's »total theatre« for the concert hall. François-Xavier Roth: »After the highly acclaimed production here at the opera house in Cologne, my wish was to perform the work in large concert halls in order to bring the orchestra out of the pit and into the hall, thus offering the audience a completely new, unfiltered perspective on the work.« Calixto Bieito adds: »I don't want to present a production in the conventional sense. It's more of an installation. It takes the usual situation in the concert hall as its starting point and emphasises how the orchestra in this piece becomes a huge, murderous machine that is capable of devouring people and spitting them out again in a changed state.«

»Die Soldaten« is one of the important milestones in the repertoire that was launched by the Gürzenich Orchestra. After Cologne's General Music Director Wolfgang Sawallisch described a performance as »an impossibility« in 1960 and Gürzenich conductor Günter Wand also rejected a rehearsal, a new attempt was made five years later. On 15 February 1965, the Gürzenich Orchestra conducted by Michael Gielen gave the world premiere at the Cologne Opera.

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