DOCUMENTATION OF THE CONCERT SERIES UNDER THE RADAR 2021 - 2023, BERLIN PHILHARMONIC, CHAMBER MUSIC HALL

Jenö Takàcs

While Jenö Gusztáv Takács (1902-2005) was born in the Hungarian Siegenburg, since 1921 part of the Austrian Burgenland, he was at home all over the world and still always committed to his Hungarian roots. Trained in Vienna as a composer (by Joseph Marx) and as a pianist (by Paul Weingarten) he nurtured close contact with his most important musical role model Béla Bartók. As a young pianist, Takács toured Europe. He later held professorships for piano at the Cairo Conservatory and in Manila. He collected Egyptian and Araibic folk music and he researched traditional Filipino music commissioned by the Berlin Phonogram-marchiv. After Austria joined the Third Reich, Takács drew back to the Hungarian Soprón to avoid the feared abuse of his person and his artistic work by the Nazi cultural authorities. In his Hungarian period from 1939 to 1948 he was inter alia director of the Pécs Conservatory.

Sandor Veress

Born in Kolozsvár/Transylvania (today Cluj/Romania),Sándor Veress (1907-1992) studied piano at the Budapest Music Academy with Emanuel Hegyi and Béla Bartók and composi-tion with Zoltán Kodály. After being active in field research of folk music he worked for three years as Bartók’s assistant at the Music Academy. As a composer his first appearance was in 1931 with his first string quartet, which was a success at the Prague IGNM festival in 1935. In 1940, despite dangers to be expected, he returned from a long stay in London to Budapest. Here he took charge of the composition class as Kodály's successor in 1943. His endeavor was to continue the “Budapest School” in the tradition of Bartók and Kodály. His students included György Ligeti, György Kurtág, and Lajos Vass.

György Ligeti

György Sándor Ligeti (1923-2006) was one of the leading composers of contemporary music. He was born in 1923 in the small Transylvanian town of Diciosânmartin (since 1920 belonging to Romania) as a child of Jewish Hungarians. Even being gifted in both science and music, he was not allowed to study physics because of restricted entry for Jews. He therefore began at the conservatory in the regional cultural center of Cluj (Klausenburg) to study the organ and studied music theory studies with Ferenc Farkas. He survived the la-bor service of the Hungarian army, war, and persecution; while his father and brother fell victim to the extermination of the Jews, his mother survived Auschwitz.

Valentin Silvestrov

Valentyn Vasylyovych Sylvestrov (*1937) never wanted to leave his hometown of Kyiv, but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 85-year-old composer had no choice but to flee. Together with his daughter, the granddaughter and a suitcase full of manuscripts, he left his birthplace and now lives in Berlin. As probably the most famous Ukrainian com-poser, he currently receives more attention worldwide than ever before. Tirelessly, Sylves-trov works and reflects the current events with quiet tones. His develop-ment was far from straightforward. Quite late, at the age of 15, he finally discovered music, and at the age of 21 he dropped out of engineering to study composition at the Kyiv Con-servatory. Together with other students, he developed (in self-study) the dodecaphony based on Hans Jelinek’s "Instructions for the twelve-tone composition” and tested it in his first symphony in 1963. He performed the work at the state examination for composition but did not receive a diploma because twelve-tone music was contrary to the principles of "socialist realism". In the 1960s he was considered one of the leading repre-sentatives of the "Kyiv Avant-Garde", his works were not played in Ukraine and in 1970, he was expelled from the USSR Composers' Association. In 1973, Sylvestrov was rein-stated because his stylistic turned towards "meta-music" (metaphysical music), a style sim-ilar to the Western "postmodernism", which was perceived less subversive. His individ-ual variant of "neo-romanticism" is based on a sensitive connection to nature and its eter-nal change, which he himself once called pantheism - "a blend of different styles as a re-minder of traditions in which modernity has left its marks.”

Krzysztof Meyer

As a student, Krzysztof Meyer benefited already from the more liberal approach to avant-garde trends and international exchange in Poland after Stalin's death. From 1962, he stud-ied composition with Stanisław Wiechowicz at the Conversatory of Music in Kraków (now the Academy of Music) and, after Wiechowicz's death, with Krzysztof Penderecki, working several times with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Witold Lutosławski in Warsaw. His begin-nings as a composer reveal him as the pioneer of the avant-garde "Polish School" and its characteristic search for a new sonority. As a pianist, he played in the Kraków ensemble for contemporary music "MW-2", which performed throughout Europe. From 1966, he taught music theory at the Academy of Music in his hometown, temporarily Meyer held the Vice-Rector position and was chairholder of Music Theory from 1975-1987. From 1985 to 1989, he was chairman of the Polish Composers' Association. Since 1987, Meyer has been liv-ing in Germany, where he taught a composition class at the Cologne State University of Music from 1987 to 2008. Still, he sees himself as a Polish composer and European, for whom not the residency is decisive, but rather a critically keen interest in the changes and developments in his home country and the world. In 2023, Krzysztof Meyer cele-brated his 80th birthday. His compositional work includes eight symphonies, con-certs, chamber music, including 15 string quartets, piano music, and as well scenic works. Many of his compositions are characterized by texts or an extra-musical program. This includes works that can be heard as commentaries on political events, such as the 6th Sym-phony, the "Polish" (1982), which responds to the atmosphere of martial law in Poland.

Nikolaj A. Roslawez

Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets (1881-1944) was considered as the Russian Schoenberg. Already in the 1910s, under the influence of Aleksandr Scriabin, Ferruccio Busoni, under the impact of Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism, he had developed a "new fixed sys-tem of tone organization": Starting with tone complexes, the so-called "synthetic chords", he arrived at procedures similar to Schönberg's in order to bring atonal harmony into a new constructive order. Born in the small Russian town of Surash (now Oblast Bryansk), he stud-ied in Kursk and Moscow, received a professorship at the Academy of Music in 1921 and later at the Kharkov Music Institute, where he became principal in 1922. After the Febru-ary Revolution, Roslavets initially supported the new political movement, but quit the Com-munist Party in 1921. He fought journalistically for Western contemporary music and was one of the most important figures for the left-avant-garde "Association for Contemporary Music" (ASM), which had been ruthlessly opposed by the traditionalist "Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians" (RAPM) since the mid-1920s, an association with the goal of en-forcement of the the rigid principles of "Socialist Realism". Because of "formalistic" and "anti-popular" activities, he was banned from working, retired to Tashkent for some time in the early 1930s and died impoverished in Moscow in 1944. Roslavets must have had pow-erful enemies, because his work was kept silent until the 1990s.

Tadeusz Kassern

Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern (1904-1957) was born in Lemberg, then part of the Austro-Hun-garian Monarchy (today Lviv, Ukraine). A member of the Jewish-Polish population of the city, he studied piano and composition at the Conservatory of the Polish Music Society in Lemberg. He later moved to the Poznań Conservatory and in 1929, he graduated in law at the Poznań University. At the age of 24 he became 2nd winner in the competition of the Paris Association des Jeunes Musiciens, which earned him a reputation as one of the most influential figures of new music in Poland and performances throughout Europe. In 1930, he lived in Paris and established contacts with the local society of young Polish musicians. Until 1939, he worked for the Public Prosecutor's Office in Poland. From August 1939, Kassern was wanted by the Gestapo because of his Jewish descent and a dramatic journey began. He went underground. Via Lwów, he made it to Kraków in 1940, where he worked in a book shop under a fake identity for a while. He then concealed himself in Warsaw with false pa-pers under the name Teodor Sroczyński. After the Warsaw Rebellion, Kassern arrived in Zakopane, from where he returned to Poznań in the spring of 1945. In 1945, he went to New York as cultural attaché of the Polish consulate, where he was appointed consul in 1947. In the same year, he took over as Polish Envoy for Cultural Affairs at the UN. In 1948, Kassern became the first famous Polish musician to break away from Stalinist-dictated Poland and decide to live in permanent exile in the USA. His emigration resulted in his total ban in Po-land: commissions for compositions were withdrawn, the publication of his works was ceased, performances of his music were prohibited, and finally, Kassern was expelled from the Polish Composers' Association. Over the next five years, during the zenith of the McCar-thy era in the USA, Kassern suffered the humiliating effects of the Cold War, which drove him to attempt suicide. Several requests for approval of immigration status as a necessary first step to citizenship were rejected - even as an anti-communist political refugee, one was suspect to the highest American immigration authorities. During these years, Kassern taught at the New School for Social Research, the Third Street Music School and the Dalcroze School of Music. In 1957, he died of cancer in New York.

Rudolf Wagner-Regeny

As a child, Rudolf Wagner-Régeny (1903-1969) was influenced by the multinational music of his Transylvanian hometown of Szaszregen (now Reghin/Romania). Leveraging the con-tacts of his business-traveling father, he was able to study in Leipzig and Berlin. Berlin be-came his home of choice. There he worked as a ballet repetiteur and choir director at the Volksoper, accompanied Rudolf von Laban's Kammertanzbühne as a pianist, composer, and conductor on their tours, and celebrated his first successes with 6 short operas in his most important creative field - music theater. Even though his wife was half-Jewish, he stayed in Berlin after 1933, because he did not want to give up the new collaboration he had just begun with Caspar Neher. In total, four operas were created in collaboration with Neher, three of which were successfully performed during the "Third Reich", among others by Her-bert von Karajan. These operas can be read between the lines as testimnies of cautious intellectual resistance. In 1943, Wagner-Régeny was drafted into the Wehrmacht. The experiences of the war as well as the illness and death of his wife led to a deep depression. The Soviet military administration installed him as professor and rector of the Rostock Academy of Music. In 1950, he accepted an academic invitation to teach at the East Berlin Academy of Music. He became a member of the German Academy of Arts (East) and director of a master class for composition. As a composer and teacher, he refused to yield to the de-mands to ban "late bourgeois formalists". He lectured on twelve-tone music, Schönberg, Webern and also utilized the twelve-tone method and variable meters in his works in the early 1950s. As a highly respected mentor, he supported numerous master students who later formed the "avant-garde" in the GDR, among them Rainer Bredemeyer, Paul-Heinz Dittrich, Manfred Schubert, Friedrich Goldmann, Georg Katzer and Siegfried Matthus. Wag-ner-Régeny was not a member of the resistance, neither after 1933 nor after 1945, but he did not bend and remained true to his credo of practicing „art as a mediating layer for ethical education“. Max Becker describes his basic compositional style as "lyrical classicism", re-straint, sobriety, clarity, "sounding, quasi epic distance".

Kurt Schwaen

In the GDR, every child knew Kurt Schwaen (1909-2007). His children's songs were com-mon knowledge ("Wer möchte nicht im Leben bleiben"), his cantata "König Midas" was part of the school curriculum. Music students, folk and amateur musicians could discover (or commission) music by Schwaen for almost any instrument, any instrumentation and any level of difficulty. The fact that Schwaen also composed operas for adults, stage music, orchestral music, concertos, chamber music, piano pieces and piano songs of highest sen-sitivity was not sufficiently recognized, even before the political change in 1989. And even after the fall of communism, performances of Schwaen's music are extremely rare. Kurt Schwaen was 98 years old and his catalog of works includes over 600 compositions.
As a composer, Kurt Schwaen was largely self-taught. Born in Katowice in 1909, the son of a merchant was given music lessons in his hometown by a pupil of Max Reger, Schwaen studied musicology at the Berlin University and attended music seminars with Hanns Eisler at the MASCH (Marxist Workers' School). In 1935, he was sentenced to 3 years in prison for "preparing a highly criminal operation" and in 1943, he was called up to "Strafdivision 999" as "unworthy of military service". During the years in between, he worked as a répéti-teur for artistic expressive dance, including for Mary Wigman and Oda Schottmüller, who was later murdered by the Nazis. After 1945, Schwaen contributed to the establishment of folk music schools in Berlin on behalf of the city council, and later he worked as a music consultant for the Deutsche Volksbühne. Since 1953, he worked as a freelance composer and took on responsible duties as secretary of the Composers' Association and in the music section of the Academy of Arts. He established free spaces for the younger generation of composers in workshops and concerts and, together with his future wife Ina Iske. Schwaen founded the working group for children's music theater in Leipzig, which he managed from 1973-1983. Also the collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (stage music, school opera "Die Horatier und die Kuriatier") was influential for Schwaen. Furthermore, he had a lifelong friend-ship with Günter Kunert. Their joint radio and television opera „Fetzers Flucht“ (1959, about escaping the republic with its fatal consequences) came under the censure of formalism in 1962. Nevertheless, Schwaen never followed any dictated norms and rules, but always stayed true to his beliefs - often between sarcasm and resignation - and followed his own straight and honest path of integrity. Schwaen`s aphorism "What you don't say with three notes, you won't say with a hundred" points straight to the heart of Schwaen's compositional thinking: no frills, short, concise, pithy precise musical formulations, freshness and often an ironically intelligent, ingenious tone. (Axel Bertram)

Yevhen Stankovych

Yevhen Fedorovych Stankovych is considered the musical chronicler of Ukrainian history. * Born in 1942 into a family of teachers in Svaliava in Transcarpathia in western Ukraine, he studied in Lviv and Kyiv. He worked as a publishing editor and has been a freelance com-poser since 1976. Since 1988, he has been teaching as a composition professor at the National Academy of Music of Ukraine in Kyiv. During the years of political change, he was chairman of the Ukrainian Composers' Association. His catalog of works includes 6 sym-phonies, 12 chamber symphonies, 6 ballets, 3 operas and many more. As a young composer, he was passionate about the avant-garde, but since the end of the 1970s he considers himself more of a traditionalist in the sense that he attaches a different function to music. "I am deeply convinced that every composer must continue to search for an original musical language, for new forms and sound possibilities. But for me, music first and foremost is a product of humans for humans." An unconditional need for expression characterizes the composer's rather romantic-epic style of writing, which is deeply rooted in the folkloristic traditions of his country. Thus, a personal style evolved that has an individual profile, ranging from the oldest layers of Ukrainian folklore to new techniques. Now 80 years old, he actively participates in the life of his country. He repeatedly turns to subjects that have to do with the often painful historical and current events, such as Babyn Yar, Holodomor, Chernobyl and the current shaking of the country through the Russian war. Even that was not always wel-come. Thus, his first ballet opera "When the Fern Blooms", written in Ukrainian language, was banned in 1979 immediately before the premiere because the topic was Cossack tradi-tions of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, i.e., "the oldest traditions of the Ukrainian mythological imagination in words and music". So, this topic contradicted the "Campaign against Nation-alism in Art for the protectors of socialist realism. Also, the dramaturgy and the handling of Ukrainian folklore - Stankovych combined old folk songs with elements from rock music, aleatoric music and clusters - did not conform to the norm. Only in 2011, the first con-cert performance of this opera took place in Kyiv, and the staged premiere took place in a strongly revised version in Lviv in 2017.

Victor Bruns

The terrible despotism under Stalin did not pass by the Victor Bruns family, living in Lenin-grad (today St. Petersburg again): relatives suffered exile, imprisonment or even homicide. In addition to the usual, contrived allegations like counter-revolutionary activity and Trotsky-ist conspiracy, Germany living in the Soviet Union also were accused of espionage. Victor Bruns and his two brothers, who had been imprisoned for months, came off comparatively mildly with the banishment from the Soviet Union in 1938. Born in 1904 in his parents' sum-mer house in Ollila, Finland, Viktor Bruns studied bassoon and composition (with Vladimir Shcherbachov) at the Leningrad Conservatory. Until his banishment from the Soviet Union as a "Reichsdeutsch citizen", he was a bassoonist at the Leningrad Opera, and from 1940 held the same position at the Berlin Volksoper. Convened in the fi-nal stages of the war, he was imprisoned by the Soviets for the second time, however, he managed to return to Berlin in 1946. There he studied composition with Boris Blacher from 1946 to 1949 and was bassoonist with the Staatskapelle Berlin from 1946 to 1969, which premiered many of his works.