Ensemble Modern

The originator of musique concrète instrumentale wrote the piece 20 years ago specifically for this ensemble, which is well acquainted with the composer’s musical world.


The programme also includes works that explore to the full the timbral possibilities of large ensemble instrumentation.


In “HIMMEL” (2021) and “VOGUE” (2024) the composer Lisa Streich goes in search of transcendental spheres and the inner world of emotions. Unsuk Chin’s “Graffiti” (2013) rounds off the programme with a riot of orchestral colour inspired by the many different forms of expression available to modern urbanity.


While looking up at the sky above Rome during the COVID pandemic, a period when everyone was deprived of their familiar lifeworld, Lisa Streich discovered a portal into another, hidden world.


Like in a painting, she combines individual tones in “HIMMEL” to create different tone colours and uses spectral sounds to conjure up worlds that suddenly disappear again and give way to new ones.


In “VOGUE”, for which Lisa Streich wrote pop songs for each of the musicians in the ensemble, instrumental virtuosity fleetingly intersects with the sensitivities of their individual voices. The audience is taken on a melancholic and sombre journey around the myriad abysses of human life.


On her strolls around the many cities she has visited as a composer, Unsuk Chin became fascinated with the omnipresent and multifarious graffiti art. But that only provided the initial impetus for her ensemble piece “Graffiti”, which transports listeners into a world in which a variety of musical textures rub shoulders.

In Helmut Lachenmann’s “Concertini” the instrumentalists in the Ensemble Modern come together to give a virtuoso performance as a large ensemble, displaying their musical abilities both as individual soloists and as a single body while tapping into the wealth of timbral possibilities that is part of the inventory that Lachenmann calls up in such detail and so precisely.


Lisa Streich (*1985)

HIMMEL (2021)

for large ensemble

VOGUE (2024)

for large ensemble, also singing



Unsuk Chin (*1961)

Graffiti (2012/13)

for large ensemble



Helmut Lachenmann (*1935)

Concertini (2005)



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