European American Music Distributors Company is a member of the Schott Music Group

Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten at Lincoln Center Festival

Jun. 26, 2008

On Saturday, July 5 the Lincoln Center Festival presents Bernd Alois Zimmermann's iconic opera Die Soldaten at New York's Park Avenue Armory. This performance is the North American premiere of the highly acclaimed staging from the German international arts festival RuhrTriennale, with a virtually unchanged cast and artistic team featuring Steven Sloane conducting the Bochumer Symphoniker and David Pountney directing. The staging achieves the intimate and immersive total theater experience that the composer took decisive steps to realize more than four decades ago. The audience, literally traveling along the length of a narrow stage extending 220 feet, is transported into Zimmermann's monumental and exhaustive transformation of Jakob Lenz's 1776 play and the composer's dark and timely comment on World War II. The German newspaper Die Welt had this to say on the original 2006 RuhrTriennale production in Bochum, Germany:

Marvelous! The audience is not only caught in an optical vortex but is also part of a unique acoustic happening. An outstanding evening of music theatre. The greatest masterpiece in Bochum is the sound. Steven Sloane as the conductor of the Bochumer Symphoniker makes the work into a great sensual experience while it had been judged "impossible to perform" in 1960 when the world premiere was cancelled in Cologne.

The 110-piece Bochumer Symphoniker and its enormous percussion section, along with a jazz combo and forty singers, actors and dancers, quotes Bach amid Zimmermann's twelve-tone composition and shares a multimedia palette with taped and amplified music to produce a maelstrom of wrenching emotion and, as the composer so boldly envisioned, one of the most important operatic works of the second half of the 20th century.

The Lincoln Center Festival offers five chances to see Die Soldaten at the Park Avenue Armory this month, please visit www.lincolncenter.org to find out more.

For information about the life and music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann, visit www.schott-music.com.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Die Soldaten (1957-65)
for dramatic coloratura soprano, 2 mezzo-sopranos, alto, dramatic alto, high tenor, 4 very high tenors, very high lyric tenor, baritone, high baritone, 2 heroic baritones, bass
4(4pic, afl)3(3ob. d'am, ca)4(bcl, Eb cl)asx.3(2cbsn)- 5(5ttba, btba)4(2btpt)4(bs tbn)1-timp.2perc-Jazz-Combo: cl.tpt·gtr.db
110'

News