Ultraschall – Festival für neue Musik by Bång, Korsun, Newski, Omelchuk, Tjøgersen, Van (2023/2023), Dirigent Susanne Blumenthal, Haus des Rundfunks, Berlijn, Duitsland

Patriotism and Government’ is the title of a polemical text by Lev Tolstoy from 1900, in which the poet opposes all kinds of nationalism, the inevitable consequence of which is war. Tolstoy opposes the nationalistic furor with utopian ideas of equality and also ecological fading. Sergei Nevsky, who early and unequivocally condemned the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, confronts Tolstoy’s text with a fragile, transparent orchestral setting that deliberately relies on polyphony, i.e. polyphony. Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun has only one movement for her work: “The piece invites us on a sound journey through imaginary spaces.” In these spaces, musically characterized by concentration and calm, reality then breaks in again and again. Harmoniemusiken by the Belarusian composer Oxana Omelchuk seems like a counterpart to this: Omelchuk describes her “adaptations of imaginary pieces” from which she extracts “idimoatic signs, figures, clichés” as an “attempt at music located in no-man’s land”. Framing these three works are two soundwalks. Malin Bång traces the “urban moment” in her hometown of Gothenburg and musically develops its “‘staged’ version.” Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen takes the audience into the forest, with sounds of squirrels, owls and magpies. An idyll?