Double premiere

Lisa Streich and Julia Wolfe in interview

In June 2023, Kirill Petrenko and the Berliner Philharmoniker presentrf two world premieres. For the Swede Lisa Streich, composing is always a liberating act, a world in which she can express herself fully. In her new work ISHJÄRTA, she wants to “exploit the fine intonation of the orchestra”. Julia Wolfe, the enfant terrible of the US avant-garde, grew up with rock music and studied classical piano at the same time. Her new composition Pretty poses the question of how we look at women today. Find out all about the two female composers in our video interviews.

An interview with Lisa Streich

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Born in Norra Rada, Sweden, Lisa Streich doesn’t try to write perfect pieces, but rather finds it exciting to bring new things together. She likes to write what she wants to hear and what she hasn’t found elsewhere. With this approach, the Swede, who studied composition under Adriana Hölszky and Johannes Schöllhorn among others, has been highly successful. In 2017, she was awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, won the Rome Prize, bestowed by the Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo, and was commissioned to write a work for the ARD Music Competition in 2021, an honour that had been bestowed on Mauricio Kagel and Wolfgang Rihm in earlier years. That same year, the Karajan Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker gave the German premiere of her work Himmel. Lisa Streich has spent many years in various European cities, speaks four languages fluently, and now lives on the island of Gotland.

An interview with Julia Wolfe

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Julia Wolfe’s career began as an enfant terrible of the US avant-garde scene when she and two colleagues founded the New York “Bang on a Can” festival in 1987, which brought a breath of fresh air to the music scene with its openness to all undogmatic, quirky and experimental approaches. She now has two Grammy nominations, CD releases on the most prestigious record labels, a professorship at New York University and Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year Award. Political and social engagement plays an important role in her works today, for which she has even created a new genre: musical documentaries that tell stories, similar to the classical oratorio. An example of this is Anthracite Fields for choir and instruments, which is about the people who eked out a living in the coalfields of Pennsylvania. She received the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 2015.