7th Symphony Concert: Inequalible by Various, lun. 30 may 2022, De (2022/2022), Director Michael Schønwandt, Opernhaus, Hanóver, Alemania

The Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, born in 1952, is one of the most fascinating voices in contemporary music. The Lower Saxony State Orchestra in Hanover is presenting it with a work of magical sound poetry and dramatic beauty: Let me tell you , seven orchestral songs for soprano and orchestra, rated number one in 21st century classical music by the London Guardian in 2019. For this, the soprano Nicole Chevalier is returning to Hanover - a long-time ensemble member and overwhelming Traviata of the State Opera. "Let me tell you how it was. Let me tell you how it is. Let me tell you how it will be." (Hans Abrahamsen) Let me tell you represents Ophelia from Shakspeare's Hamleton the concert stage, in a large monodrama for a singer. Hans Abrahamsen sets Ophelia's poetically condensed memory, nature experience and self-reflection of a young woman who in the end - unlike in the drama - does not drown, but goes into the open in the snowstorm. In Shakespeare, Ophelia is an easily influenced object of the male-dominated plot. She speaks only 481 words in the five-act drama about to be or not to be and finally goes mad. But the British author Paul Griffiths used a literary device to construct a novella of over 100 pages from this reduced vocabulary, which gives Ophelia a modern voice. It gets the past, present and future: "Let me tell you how it was ... how it is ... how it will be." Abrahamsen musically sums up Ophelia's voice in an extreme spectrum of expression from glass highs to delicate lows, in front of the transparent, light, floating sounds of the large orchestra. "Unlike the other arts, music is an expression of life, because it is either completely dead - then it does not sound - or completely alive." (Carl Nielsen) The Scandinavian music before Hans Abrahamsen is also shaped by its very own lighting moods and soundscapes. The 7th symphony concert appears with two elegiac melodiesby Edvard Grieg into this musical landscape: two songs without words for string orchestra, "Herzwunden" and "Frühling". The second half of the concert is dedicated to the still unrecognized great symphonic composer of Denmark: Carl Nielsen. With the subtitle of his 4th symphony, The Inextinguishable , Nielsen sums up in one word what music alone can express for him: an elementary will to live. "Music is life, while the other arts depict life or write about it." Created in the first years of the First World War, the work is a mirror of its time, with percussive outbursts and elegiac longings.