Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich

One of Germany’s most distinctive-sounding chamber orchestras, the Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich comes to us with a special concert paying tribute to both poet Ingeborg Bachmann and composer Hans Werner Henze, who were born one hundred years ago. Alongside their joint work, The Idiot – a musical theatre adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel of the same title – a new piece commissioned by the orchestra will also be performed: a paraphrase of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness, composed by one of our most renowned composers, Judit Varga, to a libretto by Lajos Parti Nagy. The works will be performed under the baton of Daniel Grossmann, with the participation of actors Martin Weigel, Kriszta Bíró and Károly Hajduk.

The protagonist of Kertész’s novel is a young boy whose life is shaped by the unpredictable events of the Holocaust; his youthful naivety is destroyed in a world filled with cruelty and violence. Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin is branded an “idiot” by people because he does not understand (often false) social norms and the deceptive complexity of human relationships; his good faith and his ability to see purity and sincerity in people make him particularly vulnerable. The parallel between the two protagonists forms the core idea of the evening: the work of Judit Varga and Lajos Parti Nagy also explores this theme and forges a connection between the philosophical questions raised by the two novels. These are therefore not simple stage adaptations, but reinterpretations of the literary source material, focusing on the psychological and existential dimensions of the characters, presented through the means of melodrama and minimalist dance, in an interdisciplinary form characteristic of contemporary total art. The instrumental ensemble and the actors are all placed on stage, while simple changes of lighting direct the audience’s attention to the text and the music.