Visions Festival: NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra & NDR Bigband
Showcasing 21st-century music in all its diversity is the guiding idea behind the »Elbphilharmonie Visions« festival. Few are better equipped for this challenge than the NDR’s ensembles. Under the broadcaster’s umbrella, two orchestras, a big band and a vocal ensemble together cover an almost bewildering range of music, genres and styles. It is therefore only fitting that the NDR Bigband joins the »Elbphilharmonie Visions« festival for the first time, sharing the stage with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under the direction of its chief conductor and the festival’s initiator, Alan Gilbert.
This is a constellation found nowhere else: Missy Mazzoli, NDR Artist Across Ensembles 2026/27, has written her first piano concerto for Leif Ove Andsnes, Artist in Residence 2026/27 with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, commissioned by the NDR. Mazzoli herself performs as a pianist, and much of the music she has written for piano so far has the character of a love letter to her instrument – including the Brahms-inspired »Bolts of Loving Thunder«. In her Violin Concerto (to be heard on 16 April 2027), she casts the soloist as a »fortune teller, magician and healer«. It will be fascinating to discover what role and what sounds Mazzoli now fashions for her fellow musician Andsnes.
Canadian composer Darcy James Argue is one of today’s most versatile big-band arrangers. Yet Argue’s mastery extends far beyond jazz in all its forms. Even that field is too narrow for the »omnivore«, as jazz journalist Mario Dunkel admiringly described him: »I explore what big-band music might sound like if it had remained popular and absorbed everything that has happened in music since – rock, hip-hop, grunge,« says Argue. Now this master of musical cross-pollination brings a new work to the classical specialists of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra – a combination that has all too rarely been realised.