Natural horn between prefabricated buildings

The streetcar is full on the special trip to Pyramidale. The festival for new music and interdisciplinary art events has been taking place since 2001 in the Berlin district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf, the largest prefabricated housing estate in Europe with around a quarter of a million inhabitants.

An aerophone is also involved here: a tangle of tubes runs through the car, a generator pumps air through organ pipes. It hums and beeps and breathes in a duet with the sound of the tram. Violinist Biliana Voutchkova improvises to this, imitating the squeaking and setting staccato-like accents. Experimental musician Thomas Noll in white overalls pulls out the stops on his instrument, plays on individual organ pipes and also uses colorful little plastic toys to create contrasting sounds. The musicians move through the car, changing the sound space. And everything changes outside too: from the center of Berlin via Alexanderplatz, the streetcar travels for an hour further and further out through industrial areas right into the middle of the prefabricated buildings of Marzahn. From this Tramophony the audience rises and has arrived in another world.

Overflowing possibilities
As in 2010, Switzerland was the guest of honor at the 13th Pyramidale with a number of performers and composers, and the main theme was above all else: Thirst. On the first evening, the thirst theme with variations with texts by the Thuringian author Kathrin Schmidt for the world premiere. folk lampedusian docile rural crying dark impulsivewas the title of the seven parts, which were set to music by seven composers in chamber ensembles. The piece Hourless by Katia Guedes, a duet for saxophone (Meriel Price) and soprano (Franziska Welti). "When I wanted to love you", says the text, and the breath of the saxophone merges with the breath of the voice as if in an embrace. The keys of the saxophone pick up the rhythm of the speech, the sound of the instrument and the voice nestle around each other and interpenetrate, creating an almost erotic piece of music.

The seven pieces are presented in a minimalist staging. Director Holger Müller-Brandes confines himself to setting up different venues for the individual parts in the sparse glass room of the Pyramide exhibition center, thereby changing the spatial impression. Franziska Welti and narrator Christian Bormann exchange tense glances, toast with wine, and at the end a glass breaks. Strangely, despite their brevity, these scenes seem somewhat contrived and contrived. Trusting the text, music, space, mood and voice would have been more effective.

After the interval, there will still be an extensive program in which the musicians of the Ensemble JungeMusik Berlin can also prove themselves as soloists. In Interlude by Sarah Nemtsov for oboe and electronics, in which the electronically multiplied oboe voices float through the room like ghosts, oboist Antje Thierbach presents her skills. In Albedo by Helmut Zapf from 2001, Martin Glück shines on the flutes. Unfortunately, the use of electronics in this piece seems a little clumsy and too loud.

The premiere Erring paths by Johannes K. Hildebrandt is reminiscent of a nervous rush through a labyrinth. Nightmarish, fluttering, trembling, hectic impulses alternate with tense pauses and nervous runs, only to slow down at the end, like the exhausted heartbeat of someone eternally lost, like giving up, breathing out.

The piece forms an impressive conclusion The channel from the wall by Juliane Klein. Violoncello, oboe, clarinet, saxophone and flute are individually distributed around the room and play several solo pieces in parallel. Each soloist plays at their own tempo. The sound of the different instruments blends well in the sparse glass room. In the end, only the cello (Vladimir Reshetko) remains. The free composition of the piece allows the performance to sound completely different on another day, to have a completely different outcome. The knowledge of this lies over what is heard like a slightly shifted layer of possibility.