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 is taking place against the backdrop of dramatic global upheavals and the current highly endangered production conditions for art. Since its foundation, the festival has established itself as an internationally significant platform for current developments in new music, exciting experiments and surprising interdisciplinary constellations. The 32nd edition of the festival focuses on nothing less than the future of art and significant lines of development from the past. Selected projects, ensembles and artists will be highlighted and illuminated, 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 (28.03.). The Landesjugendensemble Neueste Musik Sachsen will present an important project for the next generation and, in cooperation with the Berlin Prize for Young Artists and the Konzerthaus Berlin, the young saxophonist and performer Aina Font (30.03.). The Elbland Philharmonie Sachsen will perform a world premiere by composer Wilfried Krätzschmar, who was born in Dresden in 1944, as well as a cello concerto by composer Aida Shirazi, who was born in Tehran in 1987 and now lives in New York (11.04.). In cooperation with the Semperoper Dresden, music by composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in 2023, will be performed.
As a first-generation Black British citizen, Elaine Mitchener will be exploring the legacy of Julius Eastman, the long-forgotten but perhaps most radical and exciting representative of minimal music, in a concert performance (8 April). The Trickster Orchestra’s guest performance with new compositions by George Lewis and Cymin Samawatie, among others, promises further extraordinary experiences (04.04.). At ZENTRALWERK, old musical instruments meet electronics and European baroque music meets new compositions by Sokratis Sinopoulos, Keyvan and Bijan Chemirani and Yannis Kyriakides at the “Isles & Rivers” concert (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 on his 100th birthday (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.).
