Music for 7 grand pianos by Mathias Spahlinger and on 7 grand pianos by Frédéric Chopin.

Mathias Spahlinger: Colours of Dawn
Frédéric Chopin: 24 Preludes, Op. 28

Eunhee Baek, Çya Bazzaz, Yan Cai, Juae Ha, Björn Lehmann, Sabine Simon, Yen-Ni Wu, piano / Students and teachers of the Berlin University of the Arts / Kentaro Machida, conductor

“Never cease to courageously resist wild barbarism” (Friedrich Schiller)

The desire to “allow only the more subtle colours of black, white and grey tones” is the starting point for Mathias Spahlinger’s composition Colours of Dawn for seven pianos.  Seven pianos arranged in a fan shape – 7 x 88 = 616 keys: an instrumentation that is unparalleled – indeed, a seemingly uniform landscape of timbres. However, the diversity of characters, processes and thus the tonal manifestations of the six movements is striking: the sound palette ranges from fragmented individual impulses, complexly orchestrated quasi-unison passages moving from left to right in the room, to resonance and sound surfaces, to massive tutti and sudden eruptions. 

The audience's listening habits are tested and challenged in an exciting way – and rewarded with a completely unexpected wealth of colours and forms that can change our perception and thus our thinking and feeling.

“Chopin’s works are cannons buried beneath flowers.” So wrote Robert Schumann in 1831 in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung about his contemporary. The revolutionary power that emanates from Chopin’s music is often only apparent upon closer listening. Many of the composer's pieces refer to resistance against foreign rule and can be read as symbols of the Polish national movement. This evening, the 24 Préludes will be performed, music that appears in its most condensed, refined and poetic form, yet harbours a power at its core that goes far beyond its apparent fragility and often stretches the music to breaking point. The spatial distribution of the 7 grand pianos in the hall brings the different characteristics of the 24 keys more strongly to the fore and reveals the frictions and breaks in the cycle, but also generates connections beyond the neighbouring Préludes and creates a possible interpretation of the entire cycle that emphasises its conflictual nature. Flowers, yes. But with an explosive charge.