Emigration of Strings

Emigration of Strings (Drei Orchesterstücke aus der Emigration) were written in 1998. As Hertel notes, they can be seen as fragments of associative chains of past emotions. The author's concept: '1937, musicians meet in front of a half-demolished warehouse shed for an open-air concert. Music that has been stored for a long time in bodies has disintegrated and is being mixed anew. It is said that each person should move only a few kilometres away from his usual environment and they woud become a stranger, a foreigner, an emigrant. Why then do we not want to understand and help? Why?!" Inspired by his work on the music for the documentary The Good Way (1987) about the Jewish cemeteries in Mannheim, Paul Hertel composed "Emigration of Strings". Music full of melancholic expression ("Ende und Anfang" - "Beginning and End"), cutting pain ("Erinnerung" - "Memory" ) and a slightly ironic Russian-Jewish musical counterpoint in the vision of the legendary Moscow hotel ("Hotel Metropol" – “Metropol Hotel”). The original version for string chamber orchestra was premiered in Mannheim. The composer also made an arrangement for symphony orchestra; the first performance was in the Shostakovich Hall of the St Petersburg Philharmonic with the State Hermitage Orchestra. The work is included on Hertel's CD Emigration of Strings (2010) in an interpretation by the Vienna Chamber Orchestra conducted by Philip Entremont. It has been performed in concert with various string orchestras in Paris, Zurich, Baden-Baden, Brno and elsewhere. It was first presented in Bulgaria in 2016 in Plovdiv, at the Austrian Music Weeks Festival, by the Vienna Chamber Orchestra and conductor Stefan Vladar. You are about to experience its Sofia premiere