Cancelled: MaerzMusik - Festival for Time Issues / 20.-29.03.2020

From 20 to 29 March 2020 the Berliner Festspiele will present “MaerzMusik – Festival for Issues”, which this year focuses on the beginning of time and will be present in different parts of the city with concerts, audio-visual performances and an exhibition. Highlights of MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues 2020, curated by Berno Odo Polzer, include the opening project with 30 musicians from Bolivia and Berlin, concerts with the Ensemble Resonanz, Quatuor Bozzini, Ensemble PHACE, Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and Ensemble Modern, a portrait concert for Younghi Pagh-Paan in honour of her being awarded the “Große Kunstpreis” as well as premieres by Carlos Gutiérrez, Marisol Jiménez, Cassandra Miller/Juliet Fraser, Robert Lippok/Lucas Gutierrez, Younghi Pagh-Paan and Belgian artist Myriam Van Imschoot, who will present several projects at the festival.

In its examination of time, the sixth edition of MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues this year focuses on the beginning of time and the political dimension of the idea of beginning and origin. The festival extends an invitation to a programme featuring music and artistic practices rooted in cosmologies without beginning or end; sounds that reach into the depths of time; voices that make unspoken stories from the past and present audible. Together they form MaerzMusik 2020 – ten days of concerts, audio-visual performances, film screenings, readings, public talks and an exhibition in SAVVY Contemporary. Other venues include the Parochialkirche, the Zeiss-Großplanetarium in Prenzlauer Berg, silent green, the Kraftwerk Berlin, and the Haus der Berliner Festspiele as the heart of the festival. Opening the festival on 20 March are the Bolivian Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) and the Berlin-based voice collective PHØNIX16, who will combine indigenous musical practices and sounds of the Andes with experimental musical approaches: a joint musical research process that reach beyond cultural differences.

Wrapping up the festival, MaerzMusik once again invites audiences to The Long Now at Kraftwerk Berlin (28.-29.03.): 30 hours of live performances and installations, including works by Iannis Xenakis, Carine Emanuele Cella, Phill Niblock and Myriam Van Imschoot. The complete programme for The Long Now will be released in February. As an epilogue to this year’s MaerzMusik festival, Gérard Grisey’s major work “Les espaces acoustiques” will be performed in conjunction with the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker and together with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the Ensemble Modern under the baton of Sylvain Cambreling (31.03.).