Berg: Wozzeck / Alan Gilbert

• Concerts

Sounds like the perfect script for the next Saturday night thriller or a true crime podcast: a mentally unstable outsider humiliated by his superiors catches his girlfriend cheating on him and gets carried away with murder in the heat of the moment. In 1925, however, the composer Alban Berg turned it into an opera, one of the best in the history of music: »Wozzeck«. As part of the International Music Festival Hamburg, a squad of outstanding singers led by Matthias Goerne in the title role and Alan Gilbert on the podium will perform the opera in concert at the Elbphilharmonie.



Actually, one can only feel sorry for the tragic title character Wozzeck. The penniless soldier puts up with all kinds of harassment in order to provide for his girlfriend Marie and their illegitimate son – until he can no longer withstand the psychological pressure and his jealousy brings the barrel to overflowing. Berg narrates the drama with music that is pushed to the limits of expressiveness. You first have to listen to its intensity and modernity, but then it becomes all the more gripping. Especially as he also incorporates grotesquely comic elements, such as a snoring fugue of sleeping soldiers. As a soldier in the First World War, he himself lay in the barracks – and developed a similarly deep aversion to militarism and its strictly hierarchical world order as the author Georg Büchner, who wrote the original.

It is no coincidence that the Nazi regime banned opera as »degenerate art«. But this could not stop its worldwide success. Its unmistakable message, an appeal for more humanity, still resonates today.

PERFORMERS

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester orchestra

NDR Vokalensemble choir

Hamburger Alsterspatzen choir

Matthias Goerne baritone

Michael Weinius tenor

Moritz Kallenberg tenor

Peter Hoare tenor

Falk Struckmann baritone

Christine Goerke soprano

Stefanie Irányi mezzo-soprano

Isaak Lee tenor

Fabian Kuhnen bass

Andreas Heinemeyer baritone

Dávid Csizmár baritone

Alan Gilbert conductor

Romain Gilbert scenic installation

PROGRAM

Alban Berg
Wozzeck

Concert performance in German with german surtitles