" From the heart - May it go again - to the heart" - This year Beethoven's Missa Solemnis turns 200 years old. The enormous opus was considered so difficult to perform that at the first performance in Vienna on May 7, 1824, only three movements were heard: the Kyrie, the Credo and the Agnus Dei.
In memory of the creation of what is now probably the most famous mass in Western art music, the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin is performing these three movements and combining them with the music of another great outsider in music history, whose work was spurned as ingenious and difficult and who is currently being rediscovered. The African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990) is considered a pioneer of minimal music and the Black Lives Matter movement. His compositions thrive on contradictions: serial abstraction and great emotionality, spiritual music and queer performance art. Eastman died 33 years ago, homeless and forgotten in New York.
Back to All Events