32. Dresdner Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik
28.03. – 18.04.2025
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen)
The 32nd edition of the Dresden Festival of Contemporary Music (DTZM) is taking place against the backdrop of dramatic global upheavals and the current highly endangered production conditions for art. Since its foundation in 1987, the festival has established itself as an internationally significant platform for current developments in new music, exciting experiments and surprising interdisciplinary constellations. In addition to some of the most internationally renowned new music ensembles and composers, the current edition presents important newcomer projects, provides insights into the vibrant regional independent music scene as well as projects and focal points of established institutions such as the Elblandphilharmonie Sachsen, Semperoper, Dresden University of Music, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen and Staatskapelle Dresden. Selected projects and artists will be highlighted, which are currently bringing the power of collective listening, but also the fragility of artistic processes, back into focus.
The festival will be opened by Ensemble Modern with an immersive concert archive installation by the young composer Anda Kryeziu and a portrait concert of the composer Kaija Saariaho (28.3.), whose opera “Innocence” can currently be experienced in a new production at the Semperoper. In cooperation with the Saxon Music Council and Ensemble Modern, the Landesjugendensemble Neueste Musik Sachsen, founded in 2021, is developing a program (30.3.). Other important projects for the next generation include the portrait concert by young saxophonist and performer Aina Font in cooperation with the Berlin Prize for Young Artists (30.03.), the opera project “Die weiße Rose” (12.4.) as a cooperation between the Dresden University of Music and the Staatsschauspiel Dresden and the concert project by MUSAIK in cooperation with the Staatskapelle Dresden (16.4.).
The Trickster Orchestra’s guest performance in residence promises to be an extraordinary experience with new compositions by George Lewis and Cymin Samawatie, among others (04.04.). In a concert performance, Elaine Mitchener, a first-generation Black British citizen, explores the legacy of Julius Eastman, the long-forgotten but perhaps most radical and exciting representative of minimal music (08.04.). Auditiv Vokal can be experienced with musical interventions in the archive of the avant-gardes (10.+13.4.). In addition to a world premiere by composer Wilfried Krätzschmar, born in Dresden in 1944, the Elbland Philharmonie Sachsen will present a cello concerto by composer Aida Shirazi, born in Tehran in 1987 and now living in New York, as well as a work by young American composer Lauren Siess in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk (11.4.).
At ZENTRALWERK Dresden, old musical instruments meet electronics and European baroque music meets new compositions by Sokratis Sinopoulos, Keyvan and Bijan Chemirani and Yannis Kyriakides at the concert “Isles & Rivers” (15.04.). At the end of the festival, the Ensemble intercontemporain, founded in Paris in 1976, will dedicate a very special concert to the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez for his 100th birthday at the Festspielhaus Hellerau (17.04.), while Ensemble Musikfabrik will bring the visual worlds of the internationally renowned painter Gerhard Richter to life in his home city of Dresden in a mesmerizing film project with music by Rebecca Saunders and Steve Reich (18.04.).