Rihm, Wolfgang

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    In the Art Biennale’s Shadow, Venice Celebrates Music, Too

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    The glistening domes of St. Mark’s Basilica seem to billow over Venice’s largest plaza. In the 19th century, when the church was already almost a thousand years old, a mosaic was added above the main entrance, with two angels hovering near Jesus and blowing the trumpets that signal the Last Judgment.The striking placement of the image — you can’t miss it — symbolizes music’s historical centrality in the city that has been home to giants extending from the days of Vivaldi, Gabrieli, Monteverdi and Cavalli to 20th-century masters like Luigi Nono. On a recent Thursday evening at the basilica, under the auspices of the Venice Music Biennale, two choirs in lofts high above the ground faced each other across the glittering gold interior and filled the vast expanse with a “Stabat Mater” by Giovanni Croce, a piece that was written to be performed in this very space some 425 years ago.These days, though, Venice is more of an art town. Every other year, crowds swell this floating labyrinth of twisting alleys and lapping canals for the enormous, seven-month-long Venice Art Biennale, one of the defining events of the global visual arts scene. In 2022, over 800,000 tickets were sold; this year’s iteration continues through Nov. 24.Lisa Streich’s “Stabat” was performed inside St. Mark’s Basilica, alongside Giovanni Croce’s 16th-century “Stabat Mater.”While the Venice Film Festival (organized, like the art event, by La Biennale di Venezia) is world-famous, you could be forgiven for not knowing that under the Biennale’s umbrella are also festivals devoted to architecture, dance and theater — and to music. As fall begins, the temperature cools and the city becomes ever so slightly emptier, the music biennial opens for a two-week stretch of roughly hourlong performances; I attended nine of them over five days earlier this month.Like the art festival, the Music Biennale ventures beyond established exhibition spaces to Venice’s palazzos and churches. It has a base at the Arsenale, a complex of old shipyards and factories, but it sprawls across the city for site-specific concerts: multichoral pieces at St. Mark’s Basilica, delicate viola da gamba duets in the ornate 16th-century Marciana Library, grand ensembles at the gilded Fenice opera house.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      One of Classical Music’s Great Builders Prepares for the Next Step

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      Over 25 years, through crises and a changing world, Michael Haefliger has made the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland as we know it.Michael Haefliger has made a life out of building music festivals.A Juilliard-trained violinist, he came up with the idea not long after finishing school to create the Davos Festival in Switzerland for young artists. Then, a quarter century ago, he took over the established, expansive Lucerne Festival, which opens on Friday with a performance by the orchestra he founded.Now 63, Haefliger has enjoyed rare success in classical music: His long tenure at Lucerne has been defined not only by sustainability and survival through crises like the coronavirus pandemic, but also by enormous growth.He started the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with the eminent conductor Claudio Abbado; with the iconoclast Pierre Boulez, he created the festival’s academy; when Japan was hit by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in 2011, he spearheaded Ark Nova, an inflatable, portable concert hall that brought the festival to Matsushima.Over time, Haeflinger has lost major collaborators. Abbado died in 2014; Boulez, two years later. Wolfgang Rihm, Boulez’s successor, died last month. (Riccardo Chailly, who took over the Festival Orchestra after Abbado, will lead Rihm’s “Ernster Gesang” at the opening concert.)“He was quite a strong figure,” Haefliger said of Rihm in a recent phone interview. “The way he saw things and programming was very open. He didn’t remain in his own school and tradition, which is important today in contemporary music.”Rihm’s contributions to the 2025 festival were already settled before his death. That year will also be Haefliger’s farewell; he steps down as artistic and executive director next summer. What comes after that for the academy, and Lucerne in general, will be up to the next leader, Sebastian Nordmann, from the Konzerthaus in Berlin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wolfgang Rihm, Prolific Contemporary Classical Music Composer, Dies at 72

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      Likened to a “court composer” for Germany, he wrote more than 500 pieces and was considered one of the most original and independent musical voices in Europe.Wolfgang Rihm, a composer whose forceful, shape-shifting output reinvigorated contemporary classical music, died on Saturday in Ettlingen, Germany. He was 72.His death, in a hospice outside the city of Karlsruhe, where he lived, was announced in a statement by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause, but Mr. Rihm had been treated for cancer since 2017. His illness and his efforts to compose despite it were the subject of a 2020 German documentary.Mr. Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music. Among his prominent commissions was “Reminiszenz,” an “arresting, broody orchestral song cycle,” as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it in The New York Times. The work, for a tenor and large orchestra, premiered at the 2017 opening of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg.Mr. Rihm composed more than 500 works, though the exact number remains unclear because some pieces have not yet been published.He received the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the 2010 Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale and the 2014 Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music, among many other awards. He was named composer in residence for the 2024-25 season at the Berlin Philharmonic.“At times he was even like a court composer” for Germany, the music critic Manuel Brug wrote in Die Welt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More