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Ciel d’hiver

5th Philharmonic Concert: aija Saariaho: »Ciel d’hiver« / Oxana Omelchuk: »und alle flieger fliegen nach minsk« for Vocal Ensemble and Orchestra / Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony no. 5 in D Minor op. 47

Concert
Konzerthaus Stadthalle Heidelberg
Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis 2026 (Heidelberg Music Price for Female Artists)
Conductor
Ruth Reinhardt

Belarussian composer Oxana Omelchuk receives the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis 2026 (Heidelberg Music Prize for Female Composers) and has been calling Cologne her home for many years now. In her music, she connects elements of different styles, thereby placing existing aspects in new contexts.

»When I think of Finland, I remember wonderful changes in the light. Everything is distinctive. Nature creates its own acoustics,« says Kaija Saariaho, winner of the Künstlerinnenpreis 2009. In »Ciel d’hiver«, her winter sky consists of a high, cold sound broken only by a few acoustic events that flash up like stars.

Even though Dmitri Shostakovich suffered under Stalin’s despotic regime, he called his impressive, elegiac fifth symphony »a practical answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism«. The musical means he employs are less complex, but the functionaries are satisfied. Was that what he meant though?

 

With kind support of