Helmut Oehring: Seven Songs for Sunrise

Ensemble courage e.V., Dresden, Germany

On its 20^th anniversary ensemble courage is to perform the German premiere of Helmut Oehring’s Seven Songs for Sunrise at Festspielhaus Hellerau. Unique musical events mark the history of the contemporary chamber music ensemble and its members wish to remain within this tradition with three planned anniversary concerts. Alongside two portrait concerts the real main attraction is the performance of the Seven Songs for Sunrise which is supported by the EvS Music Foundation. The work originally premiered in Lausanne in 2013 is the score to Murnau’s silent movie Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Hearing and sight are the themes of this work lasting an entire evening to be presented together with the film.

Helmut Oehring’s music – featured in portraits by ensemble courage and connected to it by ties of friendship – is, in all topicality, not only a song for two in logical extension of the film title. Indeed he says: “Empathy is not just felt by individual people but by many and ultimately all people. The music is the narrator. It tells of doubt and hope. Seven Songs float with the protagonists between the inside and out, between you and me, yesterday and today, life and death, love and loss. Between the enchanting beauty of life and its countless unbearable everyday invalidations and existential threats. Everything sparkles then immediately fades again leaving sadness behind – yet in the end a glimmer appears, in an epilogue a chance for utopia. And in fact always also the opposite of this.”

May 11, 2017
Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden

Further Information
www.ensemble-courage.de