Concerts

Tremendous energy that sweeps the audience away and creates a maelstrom that is impossible to resist: This is what John Luther Adams, not to be mistaken for John Adams, and Dieter Ammann stand for. Their musical languages could not be more different. And yet both create lively, extremely natural and organically designed textures and structures. With Adams, a strong connection to nature is omnipresent, as his «Become» trilogy alone shows.

In addition to «Become Ocean» from 2013, it also includes «Become River» from 2010 and «Become Dessert» from 2017. All three parts are characterized by the places where Adams worked. Before moving to the Sonoran Desert in the south of the USA and north of Mexico, Adams lived in Alaska. «Become Ocean» tells of the west coast on the Pacific. The three orchestral groups build up slowly over time until an exhilarating maelstrom develops.

Climate change resonates as a current urgency. «As the polar ice melts and the sea level rises, we humans are in danger of literally becoming the ocean again,» Adams remarks on «Become Ocean». In contrast, the Swiss Ammann, also known as a jazz and rock musician, works with highly energetic force fields in the piano concerto «Gran Toccata» from 2016/19.

Not only are the sound-orchestral and performative potentials of the piano explored, but also the physical, haptic and performative. «Not a second of idleness, everything is alive and in the most beautiful sense overgrown with lines of force,» said the composer Wolfgang Rihm, who died at the end of July 2024, about the music of the multi-stylist and border crosser Ammann.