09 Sep 2023,
19:00
Main Auditorium
Series: A – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Musikfest Berlin
Berliner Philharmoniker
Jörg Widmann conductor and clarinet
Carolin Widmann violin
Works by Jörg Widmann and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
In Search of the Uncertain
Composer in Residence: Jörg Widmann
Jörg Widmann über seine Residency bei den Berliner Philharmonikern
Jörg Widmann’s compositions are enormously diverse, and for a simple reason: he doesn’t want to bore himself with doing the same thing. The chief beneficiary of this passion for discovery, of course, is the audience. Jörg Widmann is the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Composer in Residence for the 2023-24 season.
“My main driving force in composing always comes from the emotion. Beethoven once wrote: ‘From the heart – may it return to the heart.’ My art comes from the heart. Or I would go even further: Art comes from necessity. I cannot do anything other than compose a piece that’s weighing on my mind.” Jörg Widmann is regarded as one of the most exciting musicians of our time – and as one of the most versatile. For more than two decades, he’s been receiving commissions from leading orchestras and ensembles. As one of the finest clarinettists, he tours the concert halls of the world and regularly inspires composers to create new works for his instrument. And for several years, his third area of activity has been conducting. Widmann was principal conductor of the Irish Chamber Orchestra until the end of 2022 and is constantly expanding his activities as an orchestral director. In addition, he teaches young composers, currently at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin.
The most important thing for Jörg Widmann: the sound
If one can still talk about musical child prodigies nowadays, then Jörg Widmann was one of them. His first clarinet instruction at seven, compositional instruction at the age of eleven, major concert appearances already in his youth. After that a solid musical training as instrumentalist and composer with the most renowned teachers in Munich, Karlsruhe and New York, among them Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm. By his early 20s, Widmann, born in 1973 in Munich, was numbered among the most interesting musical personalities of his generation.
From the beginning he has addressed people of the most diverse backgrounds with his music. His mainly large-scale scores are just as impressive in a specialized avant-garde forum as in a traditional symphony concert. His musical language is modern, experimental, while at the same time of such clarity and urgency that it wins over laymen as readily as experts. The sound is everything for him. It isn’t by chance that he calls himself an “instrumentation fetishist”.
Dialogue across the centuries
As an interpreter of the clarinet concertos of Mozart and Weber, he is fundamentally preoccupied with a critical examination of the tradition. “I find the most exciting programmes to be those which combine music of the past with music of today. It sometimes isn’t enough for me to hear only contemporary works. But the same is true of an entire evening of just Baroque music. Music really catches fire for me in a dialogue across the centuries.” Widmann the musician is constantly being driven into the open-ended, into the uncertain: “I wish for my own sake that each work is different, quite simply because I don’t want to bore myself. When somebody always does the same thing all his life, at some point they call that style. For me, the new and different is much more important.”
Concerts with works by Jörg Widmann
10 Sep 2023,
20:00
Main Auditorium
Series: B – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Musikfest Berlin
Berliner Philharmoniker
Jörg Widmann conductor and clarinet
Carolin Widmann violin
Works by Jörg Widmann and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
18 Jan 2024,
20:00
Main Auditorium
Series: L – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Berliner Philharmoniker
Daniel Harding conductor
Antoine Tamestit viola
Works by Jörg Widmann and Anton Bruckner
19 Jan 2024,
20:00
Main Auditorium
Series: K – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Berliner Philharmoniker
Daniel Harding conductor
Antoine Tamestit viola
Works by Jörg Widmann and Anton Bruckner
20 Jan 2024,
19:00
Main Auditorium
Series: A – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Berliner Philharmoniker
Daniel Harding conductor
Antoine Tamestit viola
Works by Jörg Widmann and Anton Bruckner
14 Feb 2024,
20:00
Chamber Music Hall
Chamber Music | Series: U – Piano
Lucas & Arthur Jussenpiano duo
Works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, Jörg Widmann, Claude Debussy and Sergei Rachmaninoff
02 Mar 2024,
22:00
Main Auditorium
Philharmonie »Late Night«
Late Night
Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker
Jörg Widmann conductor and clarinet
Sarah Aristidou soprano
Annika Treutler piano
Works by Jörg Widmann and Franz Schubert
10 Apr 2024,
20:00
Chamber Music Hall
Chamber Music | Series: W – Artist in Residence
Lisa Batiashvili violin
Jörg Widmann clarinet
Denis Kozhukhin piano
Tsotne Zedginidze piano
Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker
Works by Jörg Widmann, Tsotne Zedginidze, Sergei Prokofiev and Béla Bartók
17 May 2024,
20:00
Chamber Music Hall
Karajan Academy | Series: KA – Karajan Academy
Karajan-Akademie der Berliner Philharmoniker
Kirill Petrenko conductor
Works by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Jörg Widmann
30 May 2024,
20:00
Main Auditorium
Series: C – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Berliner Philharmoniker
Sir Simon Rattle conductor
Stefan Dohr french horn
Works by Jörg Widmann and Anton Bruckner
31 May 2024,
20:00
Main Auditorium
Series: B – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Berliner Philharmoniker
Sir Simon Rattle conductor
Stefan Dohr french horn
Works by Jörg Widmann and Anton Bruckner
01 Jun 2024,
19:00
Main Auditorium
Series: I – Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker
Berliner Philharmoniker
Sir Simon Rattle conductor
Stefan Dohr french horn
Works by Jörg Widmann and Anton Bruckner