Like the tours in the years 2011 and 2013, students of the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar will once again be performing together with fellow students from the befriended Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. After the successful project phase in 2013, the chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic, Michael Sanderling, has once again been engaged to work with the young orchestra. Along with the world première of the new work by Ziv Cojocaru, the program includes Kurt Weill’s 2nd Symphony, Peter I. Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture “Romeo and Juliet” and the Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major by Dmitri Shostakovich. The soloist will be the Weimar cello student and winner of the Hamburg TONALi Grand Prix 2012, Alexey Stadler.
After a week of intense rehearsals in Weimar beginning on 25 July, the first major performance will take place on Sunday, 2nd August at 7:30pm at the Weimarhalle. The concert will also be the final event of the Weimar Master Classes, which take place during the preceding two weeks. Subsequently, the „Young Philharmonic Orchestra Jerusalem Weimar“ will travel to Wolfsburg: There the orchestra will play a concert at CongressPark on Tuesday, 4 August at 7:30pm. The highlight of the German tour will be the Opening of the Concert Series “Young Euro Classic” on Thursday, 6 August at 8:00pm at the Berlin Konzerthaus, before the orchestra performs the last concert in Germany onSaturday, 8 August at 3:00pm during the Chorin Musiksommer at the Chorin Monastery. During the concert tour from 23 until 26 October 2015, three concerts are planned to take place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Along with the 2nd Symphony of Jewish-born Kurt Weill, who emigrated to the USA in 1935, the work commissioned from the Israeli composer Ziv Cojocaru is closely entwined with the orchestra’s concept: Ziv Cojocaru was born in Beer-Sheva, Israel, in 1977 and works as a composer, arranger and pianist in the contemporary music scene of his homeland. Cojocaru is very interested in building bridges between classical, contemporary and popular music. He comments about “Links.Metamorphosis”: “The work is dedicated to the ideals of learning, aesthetics, expression and humanity, just as these qualities are lived and demonstrated during this cooperative Weimar-Jerusalem project”.
Thuringia’s Minister of Science, Wolfgang Tiefensee, characterizes the orchestra project as “an example of actively practiced understanding between nations that builds an important cultural bridge between our country and Israel with all its citizens”.
Among the outstanding achievements of the previous projects of „Young Philharmonic Orchestra Jerusalem Weimar“ were the concert “Gedächtnis Buchenwald” (“In Memoriam Buchenwald”) for the opening of the Kunstfest Weimar in August 2011, as well as the Federal President of Germany’s benefit concert at the end of July 2013 in the presence of President Joachim Gauck in the Weimarhalle. The proceeds of this concert were donated to the youth work of the Memorials Foundation of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. The subsequent concert during the “Young Euro Classic” Festival in Berlin as well as the final concert of the German tour at the reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden were very successful in 2013.
Conductor: Michael Sanderling
Solist: Alexey Stadler
Program:
Ziv Cojocaru: Links.Metamorphosis (UA)
Kurt Weill: Sinfonie Nr. 2
Dmitri Schostakowitsch: Cellokonzert Nr. 1
Peter Tschaikowsky: Fantasie-Ouvertüre Romeo und Julia