Detlev Glanert’s Vexierbild Premieres at Grand Teton Music Festival
The world premiere of Detlev Glanert’s Vexierbild opens the 2024 Grand Teton Music Festival, led by Sir Donald Runnicles, this June.
Detlev Glanert’s Vexierbild. Kontrafaktur mit Brahms (Hidden Image. Contrafactum with Brahms) receives its world premiere with Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra on June 28-29. The work is a companion piece to Brahms’s Symphony No. 3, also featured on the program.
Brahms has long been a major source of inspiration for Glanert. Vexierbild is the latest in a series of companion pieces to Brahms’s four symphonies, following Brahms-Fantasie (2011-12), Weites Land (Open Land) (2013), and Idyllium (2018-19), which were written as companion pieces to the first, fourth, and second symphonies, respectively. Glanert also orchestrated and expanded upon Brahms’s Four Serious Songs with his widely performed Four Preludes and Serious Songs.
Vexierbild, or Hidden Image, depicts the mystery surrounding Brahms's Third Symphony. Glanert states, “It came out of nowhere; nobody has any information about when he started it or was even thinking about it.”
The subtitle Contrafactum with Brahms references creating new music from old. While heavily influenced by Brahms, Glanert avoids direct quotations in these works, instead focusing on Brahmsian gestures, figures, motifs, and structural qualities. Glanert’s inspiration is drawn from Brahms’s “ideas and his inner material, but it’s my own Brahms,” he states.
Sir Donald Runnicles is known as one of the world’s leading interpreters of Brahms and has been a major champion of Glanert’s works in recent years. He has conducted the US premiere of Idyllium at the Grand Teton Music Festival in 2022, the world premiere of his opera Oceane in 2019 with Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the 2012 world premiere of Brahms-Fantasie with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, among others.
> Listen to Runnicles lead Glanert’s Idyllium at Grand Teton Music Festival
Other Glanert highlights this summer include the world premiere of his Percussion Concerto with soloist Christoph Sietzen, the Arctic Philharmonic, and Christoph-Mathias Mueller (May 24); as well as the Swiss premiere of his arrangement of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C Major at L'Orchestre International de Genève (Jul 31).
Concert Information
Friday, June 28 at 10am MDT (Open Rehearsal)
Friday, June 28 at 7pm MDT
Saturday, June 29 at 6pm MDT
Walk Festival Hall, Teton Village, WY
More info
Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra
Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor
Augustin Hadelich, violin
DETLEV GLANERT Vexierbild (World Premiere)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Violin Concerto
JOHANNES BRAHMS Symphony No. 3
> Further information on Work: Vexierbild. Kontrafaktur mit Brahms
Photo: Bettina Stöss
