Elbphilharmonie shines at the Reflektor Festival with André Heller

Hamburg, 5 February 2024: Austrian multimedia artist André Heller is performing at the Elbphilharmonie from 16 to 24 March 2024. For his Reflektor Festival, the legendary art expediter is bringing together musicians from all genres and curating an extensive and imaginative supporting programme. Projections on the façade and in the foyer area make Hamburg's famous concert hall shine in a new light: For nine evenings, a large light installation by Heller on the outside of the Elbphilharmonie invites concertgoers and other curious visitors to stop and marvel, while for the projections in the foyer area he was able to win the cooperation of exceptional painter Xenia Hausner. The musical programme is a celebration of diversity and encounters. Internationally acclaimed Finnish opera singer Camilla Nylund performs on the same evening as five-time Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo from Benin. A Finnish Dadaist choir of shouting men is juxtaposed with traditional Bulgarian a cappella virtuosos. Ecstatic Gnawa music from Morocco is combined with hypnotic Sufi singing from Pakistan. A particular favourite of Heller's is the Jewish Music Night, which presents a fascinating kaleidoscope of Jewish singing traditions from all over the world – nothing if not relevant now. There is also a theatre evening to mark the 100th birthday of Maria Callas, the first German concert by unrivalled songwriting legend Jimmy Webb and an evening with today's leading interpreters of Viennese song from Heller's native city. In conversation, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and singer Florian Boesch examine the »foreign« aspects of Schubert's music, while the weekends, a selection of the films made by Heller in recent decades will be shown in the Kaistudios as part of the festival. Tickets are available at www.elbphilharmonie.de.

André Heller has been the talk of the town again since his art amusement park »Luna Luna« recently found its way from Hamburg, where it originated in 1987, to Los Angeles. Rapper Drake, one of the most successful musicians of our time, is involved in the project, which has already attracted thousands of enthusiastic visitors, including art-loving stars like Dua Lipa and Leonardo DiCaprio, turning Heller into an Instagram phenomenon. In his illustrious career, Heller has previously been a director, chansonnier, painter, radio producer, author and internationally successful multimedia artist. His previous projects range from garden artworks, curiosity cabinets and literary bestsellers to large flying and floating sculptures. In addition to directing shows, plays, circuses, films and operas, and pursuing an award-winning career as a singer and songwriter, he has also created fire spectacles, labyrinths and museum buildings. Heller, who lives in Vienna, Marrakesh and »on the road«, does not refer to himself as an artist. He sees himself as a student trying to erase blank spots on his knowledge map.

»A stranger is only a stranger in a strange place« - these words from a half-Dadaist, half-philosophical text by comedian and author Karl Valentin are the guiding principle of André Heller's »Reflektor« festival. For the kick-off on 16 March, he has arranged an encounter between contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and baritone Florian Boesch. Based on Franz Schubert's well-known song cycle »Winterreise», they will discuss the feeling of being a stranger.

Immediately afterwards, the rhythmic music of the young Gnawa singer Hind Ennaira from Essaouria (Morocco) meets the powerful Qawwali of the incomparable Sufi ensemble led by Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad from Pakistan in the Great Hall. When »Famoudo« Don Moye is sitting at the drums, jazz drumming and African-inspired percussion merge into a fascinating sound structure. Bornin 1946, the drummer named his large collection of percussion instruments from all over the world »Sun Percussion«. He achieved fame with them from 1970 onwards in the legendary experimental jazz collective Art Ensemble of Chicago, where he still plays with great virtuosity and in all tone colours. On 17 March, he is appearing in the Recital Hall together with Christoph Leloil and Simon Sieger.

The Finnish shouting men's choir Mieskuoro Huutajat and the Bulgarian women's choir Bulgarian Voices Angelite are among the best-known vocal groups in their respective countries. Mieskuoro Huutajat declaims, shouts and screams everything from national anthems to children's songs and legal texts on stage. With music located between Western harmony and microtonal vibrations, between tradition and the present, Angelite leave all folk-music clichés far behind them (17 March).

Jimmy Webb wrote the hits for such stars as Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand and The 5th Dimension, classics such as »MacArthur Park», »Up, Up and Away» and »Wichita Lineman» - an unrivalled masterpiece for Bob Dylan, among others. Now Webb is appearing on stage in Germany for the first time, a unique opportunity to experience the songwriting legend live (18 March). Three different vocal ensembles are appearing on 19 March at the Jewish Music Night in the Great Hall: Jewish religious poetry, called Piyut, gave the Piyut Ensemble its name. Synagogue songs, music from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as elements of very different world music are the sources of inspiration for its spiritual, artistic work. Powerful rhythms and chants characterise the music of the Voices of Yemen. The main aim of the ensemble, founded by Ravid Kahalani in 2021, is to preserve the mystical Jewish songs of Yemen, enriched with contemporary grooves. The Jewish diaspora also has its place in this unique concert: in Brooklyn, young Hasidic singers have been following in the their ancestors' footsteps and performing traditional synagogue songs for several years now. The Brooklyn Cantors programme also includes a song by Jossele Rosenblatt, who worked in Hamburg from 1906 to 1912 before becoming famous in the USA, and is still considered an important reference for cantor singing today.

Maria Callas is the most famous soprano of all time. The successful 1995 play »Meisterklasse« (Master Class) by US playwright Terrence McNally depicts how Callas teaches three young singers after the end of her stage career, and finds herself in the process. Music by Verdi, Puccini and Bellini is heard as if in passing. The legendary production by the Vienna Volkstheater is now being shown in Hamburg for the first and only time - with actress and singer Andrea Eckert as the ungracious, vulnerable diva (20 March).

The award-winning soprano Camilla Nylund, fêted in particular for her dramatic roles in Wagner and Strauss, is one of André Heller's absolute favourite artists. On 21 March she appears in a double bill with Angélique Kidjo, who combines West African influences with R&B, funk and pop like no other musician. Nylund sings orchestral arrangements of evergreens from the Great American Songbook, and the result is a programme featuring songs of very different origins, interpreted by two greats of their genre. The Soweto Gospel Choir, which has won five Grammy awards, was founded to celebrate the unique and inspiring power of African gospel music. At the Elbphilharmonie, it presents songs by Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Ottis Redding and, at the special request of André Heller, songs by great names such as Bob Dylan and Prince (22 March). The singers Oum from Morocco and Noura Mint Seymali from Mauritania have set themselves the goal of updating traditional folk-music forms. They blend their respective national musical traditions with new genres, making them relevant to the present day (23 March).

Guitarist Harri Stojka manages the rare balancing act between punk, jazz and fusion, but never loses touch with his family roots in so-called »gypsy jazz«, which he grew up with as the child of an artistically diverse Lovara-Rom:nja family. A few months ago, the story of his father, who died in 2014, caught up with Stojka: a handwritten booklet he had written in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which had been lost for over eight decades, came to light in the Holocaust Gallery of London's Imperial War Museum. Stojka talks to musician and journalist Robert Rotifer in the Elbphilharmonie about the moving story of this find. This is followed by a furious acoustic set celebrating the indelibility of Rom:nja culture in the face of discrimination and genocide (24 March). Singer-songwriter and poet Ernst Molden and André Heller have put together a group of musicians for the final evening who have one thing in common: they breathe new life into the Viennese song with great respect for tradition. Poetry, black humour, lightning-speed mockery and heart-rending melodies - both soaring and sorrowful - are brought to Hamburg by the charismatic singer Voodoo Jürgens, Nino Mandl, better known as Der Nino aus Wien, Austrian superstar Marco Wanda, the songwriter Anna Mabo and singers Tini Kainrath and Ursula Strauss. The Neue Wiener Concert Schrammeln and the Frauenorchester (24 March) accompany them with instrumental variety.

André Heller has already crossed paths with Austrian artist Xenia Hausner on several occasions: most recently at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, where André Heller made his opera debut in Berlin with »Der Rosenkavalier», ably supported by Hausner, who has done the stage design at major theatres in London, Vienna and Salzburg. André Heller adds another facet to the »Reflektor« with Hausner's large-format, colourful paintings, which are projected onto the walls before and after the concerts in the foyer of the Great Hall. »My motifs here not only represent migration in the current sense, but also rootlessness and a lack of belonging in general. Not arriving is familiar to me,« says the artist about her »Exiles« series of works. Her various pieces were inspired, among other things by the refugee movements of 2015.

André Heller has been portraying very different personalities and their lives in his film series »Menschenkinder« since 2013. Empathetic conversations give the interviewees space to talk freely about their biographies. Without any pressure or predetermined direction, they reveal intimate insights into their careers, suddenly remembering half-forgotten things and creating by the bye a panorama of contemporary history and different environments. Portraits of Christoph Ransmayr, Sophie Freud, Peter Fabjan and Andrea Breth can be watched in the Kaistudios. There will also be film screenings of »Im Herzen des Lichts. Die Nacht der Primadonnen« about a vocal festival of voices in a secret cave in Sicily, and of »Im toten Winkel. Hitler's Sekretärin. Die Lebensbeichte von Traudl Junge«, as well as a conversation between Gert Voss and Harald Schmidt on Lake Garda entitled »Scheitern, Scheitern, besser scheitern«  (Failing the better way) and »Jessye Norman. A portrait«.