Labor Beethoven 2020 – Virtual festival and exhibition / Saturday, 06.06.2020

On Saturday, 6th June, ‘Labor Beethoven 2020’ will kick off as a virtual festival, including the virtual exhibition ‘Labor 1802-2020’, and will be accessible at laborbeethoven-2020.de. The Akademie der Künste hereby presents a complete programme produced behind closed doors, with over 10 world premieres, one sound installation (Werner Cee), a music theatre (Novoflot) and a laboratory space focusing on experimentation.

Labor Beethoven 2020 had originally been planned as a contemporary reading of the Beethoven Anniversary that was to be held in mid March. The festival was intended to present to a broad audience the musical and interdisciplinary results of the four-year artistic cooperation by young composers from Basel, Tel Aviv and Thessaloniki. Due to the corona crisis and the ensuing shutdown, the concerts could not be performed before a live audience, but were recorded instead.

The newly created works can now be enjoyed as individual films in all their musical variety and in the spirit of experimentation. In the exhibition ‘Labor 1802-2020’, scholarly and artistic material from the era of Beethoven and the present day has been intertwined with numerous autographs, audio files, texts, photos and videos.

There is much to discover on the digital platform: the unknown experimental world of the Beethoven contemporary Anton Reicha, Marcus Schmickler’s take on Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony as a sound collage by Werner Cee, the ‘freedom opera’ Fidelio as deconstructed by Novoflot or the multifaceted acoustic experiments of the young generation of composers from Tel Aviv, Basel and Thessaloniki. The world premiere compositions were performed and recorded by outstanding contemporary musicians such as the Ensemble Adapter, the double bass player Uli Fussenegger, the harpist Alice Belugou, the violinist Zoé Pouri and many more.

Labor Beethoven 2020 – The virtual festival

Labor 1802-2020 – The virtual exhibition