Opening concert at the 73rd ION Nuremberg Music Festival

The Stegreif Orchestra puts the most pressing change of our time, climate change, centre stage through its artistic exploration of the elements of nature and water. The everyday rippling is interrupted abruptly by the sounds of war, blind destruction and ... music. Because with the symphony of change, we realise that we have to change before it is no longer possible.

In the symphony of change, Stegreif asks itself what this change sounds like. The orchestra spans the musical arc of four female composers and periods of an underappreciated musical history: from Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Wilhelmine von Bayreuth (1709-1785), Emilie Mayer (1812-1883) to Clara Schumann (1819-1896). Stegreif gives these voices a new resonance by recomposing selected works of these historical female composers by five young female members of the orchestra. Between Bingen's ordo virtutum, Bayreuth's opera Argenore, Schumann's Klavierromanze and Mayer's 7th symphony, emerges a performance that creates a new common thread in music history and, with it, breaks through the genre boundaries between jazz, classical, contemporary and improvised music.

(C) Alexander Ziegler

The symphony of change unfolds its greatest radiance when we make music, listen and act together - in the middle of the audience, between you and me. Stegreif deliberately places the last of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals at the end of its #bechange series and asks directly: Are you a partner in achieving these goals? Are we shaping change together?