Rasch

“Simply throw everything that has always interested you into the piece.” And then see how far the “thrown in”, the imagined and ultimately notated in the score, can be realized in practice, on stage. A late-night blog post by Sebastian Claren in 2012 about his cello solo piece Hear Your Brother Hear probably applies particularly to solo music, as these pieces are often created in close collaboration and intensive dialogue with the performers. This premise certainly applies to pianist Nicolas Hodges and cellist Lucas Fels. Both have initiated countless new compositions for their instrument, inviting composers of all generations to join them in thinking about new sounds, formal and/or instrumental dispositions to subsequently find new – sometimes unconventional – solutions. In their joint recital, the two musicians, who have long been associated with the Darmstadt Summer Course as instrumental tutors, draw on a rich pool of pieces, also as a duo. They span a wide range, from Claren’s Hear Your Brother Hear, which the composer has been working on since 1998 and which Lucas Fels now presents in a new version, to solo pieces by Brice Pauset, Yu Kuwabara and Evan Johnson, to two duos by Helena Tulve and by Wolfgang Rihm, who died in 2024: his Zwei Lieder ohne Worteis a short, tender reminiscence.

With kind support from the Hepner Foundation