From Mazes to Light: Lera Auerbach's Artistic Universe in Berlin
by Ilona Oltuski
Lera Auerbach | Konzerthaus Berlin | ©️Cezary Rucki, 2024
Parallel to the Creative Portrait of Lera Auerbach at the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Althafen Foundation presented the Austrian-American artist and her multidimensional talents in music, art, and literature as its Artist in Spotlight during its 2024/2025 inaugural season. Joana Mallwitz, the vibrant Konzerthaus Orchestra’s chief conductor and artistic director, premiered Auerbach’s Labyrinth, commissioned by Konzerthaus, in a sold-out concert on February 14. The orchestral version of Labyrinth is based on an earlier piano rendition from 2018, which was inspired by different texts by Jorge Luis Borges–including his The Book of Imaginary Beings–along with the music of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a pairing honored at the Konzerthaus’ Labyrinth performance.
Auerbach has been forever fascinated with mythological creatures from all cultures. In Labyrinth, she introduces the Dream Wanderer, which is based on Mussorgsky’s visitor who strolls through the galleries. “Perhaps a time traveler… or the double of the artist’s self,” as Auerbach suggests. Perhaps we could also be reminded of an audience member getting lost in Auerbach’s labyrinth of sound and imagination, which, while at times humorous, also grows more mysterious with each of the music’s piercing twists and turns. “Labyrinth is an exploration of Time in its many forms: prisms, mirrors, faces, and games. The passages of the labyrinth are the passages of Time - or perhaps Time itself is a labyrinth, endlessly expanding and contracting, with inner and outer sides indistinguishably intertwined,” describes Auerbach in her notes.
Lera Auerbach Universe–the title of the Konzerthaus event on February 15–is especially significant as it offered a comprehensive view of this multitalented artist. While concert titles usually provide limited descriptions of their program, Auerbach’s curators wanted to convey the unusual breadth of what Auerbach delivers. The event featured her at the piano, reciting her poems in German (translated from English) and describing her life and work–via slideshow–in an informative talk about the many different roles her artistic habitat demands of her as a pianist, composer, poet, artist, and conductor. A central aspect of curating an artistic residency is the wish to broaden the audience’s spectrum of experience, allowing for an in-depth perspective that can lead to differentiated and compelling examinations of an artist’s work.
For the first time, in celebration of Auerbach’s 50th birthday, such an evocative presentation took place at The Hague in October of 2023. During two weeks, the Lera Auerbach Festival at the city’s cultural center, AMARE, offered an ambitious, all-encompassing portrayal of Auerbach’s art, showcasing a variety of artistic disciplines. With a significant commitment to presenting many aspects of her music, from mighty orchestral pieces to intimate duo performances at the piano, Auerbach also held master classes and exhibited her artwork.
While helping with preparations for that festival, Mark Prihodko–a young cellist who had recently moved from New York City to Berlin–realized the importance of supporting such an influential talent as Auerbach, whom he views as one of the most captivating artistic voices of the 21st Century. While helping to curate an exhibition of Auerbach's bronze sculptures in The Hague–which included a collection of works from Florida, New York, Vienna, and Berlin–Prihodko realized he was destined to make a difference in the new role he was about to embark on as the artistic director of the Althafen Foundation in Berlin. He now saw how this could come together, supporting and presenting Auerbach as the multifaceted talent she is.
A genuinely gregarious person with incredible communication skills, Prihodko had classical training as a musician, coming through the international conservatory pipeline and graduating—like Auerbach before him—from New York’s Juilliard School. Prihodko met the Latvian-born self-made man turned real estate entrepreneur Vitali Kivman, who 2021 founded the charitable Althafen Foundation to give back to his beloved Berlin, the city Kivman proudly calls home. Intimately familiar with the beacons and constraints of the classical music world, Prihodko recognized that the lack of a sustainable cultural ecosystem was an opportunity to fulfill Kivman’s wish to support talented artists in Berlin and worldwide. They both realized that even the most established artists need support. With the worldwide dwindling of public funding and lack of entrepreneurial training, artists were left too dependent on private donorships. State funding for culture, even in Germany, where it was previously known to be excellent, just went through a dramatic budget cut. In such challenging times, entrepreneurs could profit from inspiration by their skilled creative peers, and artists would benefit from learning to think more like entrepreneurs.
The old fundraising model needed readjusting and, bringing a collaborative proposal to the AHF leadership team, the Foundation co-commissioned Auerbach’s recent composition, Flights of the Angakok, a powerful new work about the Indigenous cultures of the Arctic and the magical spirit of shamanistic journeys. The piece was initially co-commissioned by AMARE in The Hague and premiered in Amsterdam as a preamble to the Lera Auerbach Festival in the neighboring city.
Finding ways to advance such important work by artists who, like Auerbach, already enjoyed international recognition yet needed ongoing ways to facilitate their work’s visibility had to become a mission of the Foundation. It was also critical for them to inspire young talent. And who better to do so than an artist like Auerbach, whose multidisciplinary approach allows her to move between different roles seamlessly. Countless times, she has proven that she can reinvent herself. Recently, by increasingly taking over the conductor’s podium, she provides that unique breadth of the Auerbach experience. Thus, Auerbach became AHF's first Artist in Spotlight, complementing her 2024/25 Konzerthaus Creative Portrait, which had kicked off in October 2024 with the Berlin Konzerthaus premiere of her Sixth Symphony, Vessels of Light. Recognized as the Classical Concert of the Year 2024 by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Vessels of Light was commissioned by Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Center).
A profoundly moving masterpiece, Vessels of Light is written for orchestra, choir, solo cello, vocal soloists, and whisperers. Its libretto, penned by Auerbach, is based on texts by Yiddish poets. The first symphonic piece of its kind, it is sung and whispered in its entirety in the Yiddish language, the language that, as Auerbach remarks, “has lost too many of its speakers.” Leading classical star pianist Evgeny Kissin helped Auerbach with the Yiddish poet’s texts and their transliteration. He has famously performed several memorable concerts celebrating Jewish composers’ music and Yiddish poetry, including recitals at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts and Carnegie Hall.
Flight of the Angakok ©Neatherland Kamerkoor
Coinciding with Yad Vashem's 70th anniversary, Mallwitz conducted the Konzerthaus Orchestra, the Kaunas State Choir, an ensemble of vocal soloists, and the Japanese-American cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper. With a unique personal history connecting Cooper with Auerbach’s music, the international performing artist had been instrumental in the piece’s commissioning process. Cooper also performed the world premiere of Vessels of Light in Kaunas, Lithuania, where Chiune Sugihara’s actions took place, and continued with the symphony’s premieres worldwide during its first two years, bookending it with the Berlin performance.
A classmate of Auerbach at Juilliard, Cooper’s father-in-law was one of the many lives saved by Consul Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas during the Holocaust. Auerbach’s piece more than lived up to the evocative historical marker which is dedicated to Sugihara, a non-Jew honored as Righteous among the Nations, who, as the Japanese Consul in Kaunas during World War II, provided visas for Jews to escape Nazi persecution through Japan, thus risking everything to save others.
Through another one of Prihodko’s efforts, Auerbach's bronze sculpture, Silent Psalm, a pendant piece to the Sixth Symphony, was on display for audiences entering the Konzerthaus foyer. In both works, the symphony and the sculpture, Auerbach weaves together different elements of breakage and repair. In her Symphony, the Psalm of David 121, “Where does my help come from?” remains silent and fragmented; it structures the symphony’s libretto, but its music notation only appears in the sculpture. The Talmudic context of the quote, “to save one human being is to save the entire world,” and the kabbalistic story of the “breaking of the vessels” are about destruction and re-creation of the world, which Auerbach here connects with the Japanese Kintsugi, the ancient technique using lacquer and gold powder to repair broken porcelain or ceramics. Like that golden glue, the cello’s melodic lines traverse the symphony’s and the sculpture’s segments. Without hiding the scars of breakage, the sculpture–a crumbled-up and burned sheet with the music notation of that psalm–also reveals a golden, if clobbered, newly-forged golden line in the shape of a Star of David.
Silent Psalm Sculpture | Bronze | Lera Auerbach 2018
Many opportunities were given to Berlin audiences to explore the breadth of Auerbach’s world and get to know her through her poetry and intimate presentations, her compositions, performances as a pianist and conductor, and selected visual artworks. She made it abundantly clear that she is a true Renaissance artist whose creativity is greater than the sum of all her creative pursuits, which simply cannot be contained in a single box or medium. The artistic leadership of exceptional talents like Auerbach will continue to serve as a benchmark to inspire the next Artist in Spotlight’s residencies of the Althafen Foundation. It has just been announced that AHF’s next season’s Artist in Spotlight installment will be devoted to the work of the Spanish-American composer Marc Migo.
