Disappearance of Wolfgang Rihm

Filarmonica della Scala joins the music world's condolences on the passing of composer Wolfgang Rihm last night at the age of 72.

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Wolfgang Rihm's name is linked to Filarmonica della Scala especially for his deep collaboration with Riccardo Chailly as the orchestra's principal Conductor . Indeed, it was in 2014 that he commissioned Transitus for large orchestra, premiered on May 5, 2014 at the Teatro allaScala.

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Dozens of compositions have been performed by Riccardo Chailly in his career, and the music of Wolfgang Rihm will be on the music stands of Filarmonica della Scala once again with Dis-Kontur in the end-of-summer tour that also stops at the Philharmonie in Berlin (Aug. 29, 2024), where the maestro was expected, as well as for the opening of the MITO SettembreMusica Festival inMilan at Teatro alla Scala.

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 "I feel a sense of emptiness and loneliness. - says Riccardo Chailly - With Rihm we had been friends since 1985, when I conducted his Schwarzer und roter Tanz. Since then I have conducted ten of his compositions, some of them premieres, with all the orchestras I have worked with, and he has always been present at rehearsals and concerts. In 2019 I conducted Dis-Kontur with the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra of which he was Conductor and in 2022 Verwandlung IV with the Festival Orchestra. In recent years I had tried to induce him to complete the project formed by Dis-Kontur and Sub-Kontur with a third piece to form a triptych. Today this project also comes to a halt. The memory remains of a brilliant mind, a very high inspiration that allowed him to transform his feelings into music with immediacy in spite of the complexity of his compositions. Rihm was a great intellectual without intellectualism. His passing caught me while I was studying Ernster Gesang, the orchestral score he composed for his father's death."

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Born in 1952 in Karlsruhe, Germany, Rihm was one of the most important composers of his generation, with a catalog of more than 400 works ranging from pieces for piano to ballet for large orchestra through all traditional musical forms including opera. Rihm began composing at the age of 11 and studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe, where he later became professor of composition. A pupil of E. Werner, K. Stockhausen and K. Huber, a prolific composer and one of the most performed contemporaries in the world, he is considered a scholar of the so-called neo-Romantic current, which, abandoning the linguistic problems of the New Music, seeks a freedom of expression outside the dogmatisms of the recent European avant-garde, as opposed to the post-Webernian avant-garde of a structuralist matrix. In addition to his encyclopedic knowledge, the composer and music mediator was a man of great openness and curiosity. He was composer-in-residence of the Lucerne Festival to which he had been attached since 1992. He was the father of two children and lived with his wife in Karlsruhe.

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ph. Courtesy Lucerne Festival