MEDIA
November 23, 2025
Konzertdokument der Woche
Forum neuer Musik 2025: Konzert E-MEX & Spóldzielnia Muzyczna - Listen and Think
Leonie Reineke
Waisengarten (2025) for ensemble and live-electronics
EU and NATO membership, a jointly regulated border established by treaty today, but also a bloody past marked by dictatorships, war, and the Holocaust, as well as the possibility of reconciliation – all of this connects Germans and Poles, or Poles and Germans. Undoubtedly, the knowledge about one another is unevenly distributed, yet cultural exchange can help reduce these deficits.
The musical-literary evening featuring actor Olaf Reitz and the ensembles E-MEX from North Rhine-Westphalia and Spóldzielnia Muzyczna from Krakow also contributes to this effort. Andrzej Stasiuk’s text “Dojczland” forms its framework. In a first-person literary narrative, the Polish author describes how he experiences Germany in train stations, airports, and hotels, and how echoes of the past emerge within his experiences of the present.
History as Individual Memory
The six musical works together amount to an almost three-generation concert. Each ensemble performs once on its own, while the larger ensemble pieces are played jointly. Zygmunt Krauze, today the most renowned living composer in Poland, offers with his drastic anti-war piece a kind of guiding instruction for the evening: Listen and reflect.
As the program unfolds, texts and songs delve into the past: much gravitates toward the new ensemble piece “Waisengarten” by Eres Holz, whose family once fled from Poland to Palestine, i.e., what later became Israel. Holz distorts acoustic memories of his childhood and deliberately creates musically ambivalent emotions.