The city of Berlin was host to a Faber Music invasion on 14 January 2005!
George Benjamin continued to celebrate his residency there with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in a concert with the orchestra at the Festival Ultraschall, that includes his own Sudden Time for large orchestra, in addition to the German premiere of Julian Anderson’s rapturous song cycle Shir Hashirim (soloist Valdine Anderson) and works by Oliver Knussen (Two Organa), Luke Bedford, James Olsen and Martin Suckling. For further details and tickets, click here.
Benjamin's DSO residency lasts until May 2005. He returns there for concerts on 13 and 14 February (conducted by Kent Nagano) that include the German premiere of his Sometime Voices (together with Mahler’s Second Symphony). Then on 3 and 4 March, soloists from the DSO give performances of his Viola, Viola for viola duo within an orchestral concert of Schumann, Schubert and Chopin. The residency ends with concerts on 6 and 8 May in which Benjamin conducts the orchestra in performances of his Palimpsests (alongside works by Scriabin, Ligeti and Ravel).
Meanwhile, on the same evening, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and David Robertson presented the second of three Berlin concerts containing Benjamin’s scintillating orchestral Palimpsests (recently released on the Nimbus label) set alongside Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi and Beethoven’s Second Symphony. The other dates are the 13 and 15 January. Click here for further details.