NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra / Tamara Stefanovich / Pierre Bleuse

Since the 2023/24 season, French conductor Pierre Bleuse has been chief conductor of the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain. As the successor to musical greats such as Pierre Boulez and Peter Eötvös, he now serves as a full-time »guardian of modernism«. Audiences in Hamburg already had the chance to experience the professional violinist during the 2025 »Elbphilharmonie Visions« festival. Now, for the Hamburg International Music Festival, Bleuse has curated a programme of 20th-century works with a common thread: rich complexity.

The legend of Tristan and Isolde dates back to the Middle Ages. Hans Werner Henze, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated in 2026, took on this tale in all its layered richness. His »Tristan« is a lavish collage for solo piano, orchestra and tape: Brahms, Chopin, Wagner – and even the sound of a beating heart – are all summoned in Henze’s mystical evocation of this mythic love story.

What do you hear while sitting alone in New York’s Central Park at night? In Charles Ives’s 1906 tone poem »Central Park in the Dark«, different sound layers – performed by spatially separated groups of musicians – drift past each other: ragtime music from afar, the clatter of horse-drawn carriages, soft string textures weaving a nocturnal soundscape. Together, they form a multi-layered, immersive panorama of a nighttime park scene.

Claude Debussy conjures musical impressions of England, Spain and the awakening of spring in his »Images« for orchestra. Drawing on English gigues, Spanish folk music and French melodies, he paints fleeting sonic pictures. Like Ives, Debussy also offers a dreamlike nocturne in the second movement: »Les parfums de la nuit« (The Scents of the Night). But in the hands of the grand master of orchestral impressionism, all remains suggestion – enchanting, elusive and never fully graspable.

PERFORMERS

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester orchestra

Tamara Stefanovich piano

Pierre Bleuse conductor

PROGRAM

Hans Werner Henze
Tristan

- Interval -

Charles Ives
Central Park in the Dark

Claude Debussy
Images for Orchestra