Munich’s new double act

Munich’s new double act

News

norman lebrecht

February 09, 2023

Manuela Kerer and Katrin Beck have been chosen to lead the Munich Biennale from 2026. The festival focuses on new music theatre.

Kerer is a composer, lawyer and psychologist.

Beck works as a music curator for the Siemens Stiftung and the Goethe-Institut.

 

Photo © Astrid Ackermann

Comments

  • La plus belle voix says:

    Looking at past programs online, it seems high time that the festival returns to its roots.

    Hans Werner Henze founded the Biennale in 1988 as a platform for young composers, apparently with the aim of producing new, experimental “forms of music theater” as opposed to New Music theater per se.

    He also strongly advocated a focus on the score not the production. Henze called this window shopping.

    Gradually, over the years, professional coproductions around the world sprung up like mushrooms, with higher and higher production values and ever increasing budgets. It turned into a festival like any other. Meanwhile, back in Munich, the whole enterprise turned into a congenital intellectual hydrocephalus, and rumor has it that the house had to be papered each night.

    Sincerely hope these two on the distaff side can sort things out.

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