Sun, Mar. 02, 2025, 11.00 am | Elbphilharmonie, Grand Hall
Péter Eötvös: “Speaking Drums” - Four poems for solo drums and orchestra
Maurice Ravel: “Daphnis et Chloé” Suite No. 2
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances op. 45
Dirigent: Thomas Guggeis
Schlagwerk: Alexej Gerassimez
Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg
General Music Director and Chief Conductor Frankfurt Opera
Artistic Director of the Frankfurt Museum Concerts
Thomas Guggeis caused an international sensation in March 2018 when he stepped in at short notice for the premiere of Salome at the Staatsoper Berlin and was subsequently appointed Staatskapellmeister from the 2019/20 season. The conductor, who trained in Munich and Milan, initially joined the Berlin State Opera from 2018 to 2020 as Kapellmeister at the Stuttgart State Opera, where he conducted works such as La Bohème, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Madama Butterfly, Der Prinz von Homburg and Der Freischütz. From autumn 2019, he conducted a new production of Daphne as well as Der Ring des Nibelungen, Samson et Dalila, Katja Kabanová, La Traviata, Die Zauberflöte, Lohengrin, Ariadne auf Naxos, Hänsel und Gretel, Don Giovanni, Elektra, Falstaff and Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor as Staatskapellmeister in Berlin. Thomas Guggeis is now a regular guest at the Vienna State Opera. He was engaged there for Die tote Stadt, Salome, La Traviata and Ariadne auf Naxos. In May 2023, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera and immediately afterwards at the Santa Fe Festival - both with The Flying Dutchman. As a sought-after concert conductor, he has already appeared with major orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the Staatskapellen Dresden and Berlin, the Munich Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris,
Essen-born percussionist Alexej Gerassimez is as versatile a musician as his instruments. His repertoire ranges from classical and new music to jazz and minimal music, and is expanded by his own compositions and new commissions.
As a soloist, Alexei Gerassimez is a guest of internationally renowned orchestras such as the Munich Philharmonic, Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and Konzerthausorchester Berlin under the direction of conductors such as Tan Dun, Kristjan Järvi, Alexander Liebreich and Jonathan Stockhammer.
He is not only a phenomenal virtuoso, but also a creative and intelligent musician with incredible energy and a wealth of colour. He creates solo programmes, performs with his own percussion group and is an enthusiastic chamber musician. A tour with pianists Arthur and Lucas Jussen will take him through the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany in May 2022. Concerts with jazz pianist Omer Klein will follow in June 2022 with the jointly conceived programme "Firebird". With the SIGNUM saxophone quartet, Alexej Gerassimez goes on "a journey through the universe", this successful programme "Starry Night" was also released as an album by Berlin Classics in spring 2021.
Alexej Gerassimez has been a "Junger Wilder" at the Konzerthaus Dortmund for the last three seasons and takes part in the "stART academy of Bayer Kultur" funding programme.
He is Professor of Percussion at the University of Music and Theatre in Munich.
The Philharmonic State Orchestra is Hamburg’s largest and oldest orchestra, looking back on many years of musical history. When the “Philharmonic Orchestra” and the “Orchestra of the Hamburg Municipal Theatre” merged in 1934, two tradition-steeped orchestras combined. Philharmonic concerts have been performed in Hamburg since 1828, artists such as Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms being regular guests of the Philharmonic Society. The history of the opera company goes back even further: Hamburg has been home to musical theatre since 1678, even if a regular opera or theatre orchestra was only formed later. To this day, the Philharmonic State Orchestra has embodied the sound of the Hansa City, a concert and opera orchestra in one.
During its long history, the orchestra encountered great artist personalities. Apart from composers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, such as Telemann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Mahler, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, since the 20th century chief conductors such as Karl Muck, Joseph Keilberth, Eugen Jochum, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Horst Stein, Aldo Ceccato, Christoph von Dohnányi, Gerd Albrecht, Ingo Metzmacher and Simone Young have shaped the orchestra’s sound. Renowned conductors of the pre-war era such as Otto Klemperer, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Karl Böhm and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt gave brilliant performances, as did outstanding conductors of our times: suffice it to mention Christian Thielemann, Semyon Bychkov, Kirill Petrenko, Adam Fischer and Sir Roger Norrington.
Starting with the 2015/2016 season, Kent Nagano has taken on the position of Hamburg’s General Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Philharmonic State Orchestra and the Hamburg State Opera and since June 2023 also its honorary conductor. In his first season Kent Nagano initiated a new project, the Philharmonic Academy, focusing on experimentation and chamber music. In 2016, Nagano and the Philharmonic toured South America, followed by concert tours to Spain and Japan in 2019, and in the spring of 2023, the Philharmonic State Orchestra made its debut at New York's Carnegie Hall under his direction, which was acclaimed by audiences and the press. Since 2017 Kent Nagano and the Philharmonic State Orchestra have continued the traditional Philharmonic Concerts at the new Elbphilharmonie, for which they commissioned Jörg Widmann to compose the oratorio ARCHE, which was given its world premiere during the hall’s opening festivities. The concert recording has been released by ECM, for which Widmann received the OPUS KLASSIK as Composer of the Year 2019, and ARCHE was performed again in 2023 to great acclaim.
The Philharmonic State Orchestra offers approximately 35 concerts per season and performs more than 240 performances per year at the Hamburg State Opera and the Hamburg Ballet John Neumeier, making it Hamburg’s busiest orchestra. The stylistic bandwidth covered by the 140 musicians, ranging from historically informed performance practice to contemporary works and including concert, opera and ballet repertoire, is unique throughout Germany. Chamber Music has a long tradition at the Philharmonic State Orchestra: what began in 1929 with a concert series for chamber orchestra has been continued since 1968 by a series of chamber music only.
In 2008 Simone Young and the Philharmonic State Orchestra won the Brahms Award of the Schleswig-Holstein Brahms Society. The orchestra has recorded the complete Ring by Wagner as well as the complete symphonies of Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner – the latter in the rarely-performed original versions – as well as works by Mahler, Hindemith and Berg, and has released DVDs of opera and ballet productions by Hosokawa, Offenbach, Reimann, Auerbach, J.S. Bach, Puccini, Poulenc and Weber.
The members of the Philharmonic State Orchestra feel equally beholden to Hamburg’s musical tradition and responsible for the city’s artistic future. Since 1978 the musicians have been participating in education programmes in Hamburg’s schools. Today, the orchestra maintains a broad education programme, including school and kindergarten visits, patronage for music projects, introductory events for children and family concerts. The orchestra’s own academy prepares young musicians for their professional careers. The Philharmonic’s musicians thereby make an equally enjoyable and valuable contribution to tomorrow’s music education in the music metropolis of Hamburg.
Dance, language and fantastic images: the three orchestral works in this concert program contain a lot of creative energy. Ravel wrote “Daphnis et Chloé” as ballet music for Diaghilev’s famous Ballets Russes. The composition initially celebrated its great success as suites on the concert stage, where its genius comes into its own. Ravel had a “large musical fresco painting” in mind for the ancient love story of the two foundlings, “concerned less with archaism than with loyalty to the Greece of my dreams”. In an outstanding splendor of color, he pours the rising sun, the song of the nymph and an ecstatic final frenzy into a painting from the early 20th century.
100 years later, the Hungarian composer and conductor Péter Eötvös, who was once a drummer himself, decides to teach the drums to speak: In his Four Poems for Solo Percussion and Orchestra, the initially rhythmically spoken text gradually transfers to the instruments. A highly virtuosic sound world from which a narrative emerges.
Things get dancey again with Rachmaninoff's last work, which he himself described as the “final spark”. It is considered a personal review of his life and his era, drawn in fantastic moods.
Venue: Elbphilharmonie, Grand Hall, Platz der Deutschen Einheit 4, 20457 Hamburg
