For the grand finale of his 10-year festival directorship, Ingo Metzmacher conducts music by the American composer Charles Ives, with whom he has a very special relationship. ‘Ives’s music opened my ears for what is modern in music. It is still the touchstone and yardstick for everything I do.’

The concert bears the title of Charles Ives’s most famous work, The Unanswered Question. Making a guest appearance in Hanover is the world-famous American baritone Thomas Hampson.

Together with the NDR Radiophilharmonie, the HMTMH Hochschulorchester and nine choirs from Hanover, Ingo Metzmacher presents a wide spectrum of Ives’s orchestral works, songs and choral pieces in the HCC Kuppelsaal.

Metzmacher shares his enthusiasm for this brilliant music-historical outsider with the audience of this very special concert as both conductor and compère.Charles Ives, who was born in 1874 in a small town in Connecticut and died in May 1954 in New York, is one of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic composers of the early twentieth century, and is seen as a pioneer of modern American music. His works are characterised by a unique blend of tradition and innovation, national consciousness and avant-garde. His music is deeply rooted in American culture, particularly in its folk music, church rhythms and nineteenth-century patriotic melodies. These influences are integrated into a modern, often radically dissonant and experimental framework.

Ives’s vision was to portray the diversity and heterogeneity of American culture musically, and this is reflected in his highly individual and structurally finely elaborated sound world. Ives created audible landscapes pervaded by simultaneously sounding marches, hymns and folksongs, as if he wanted to make audible the concurrence of different levels of time and culture in the life of an American.   

The concert programme selected by Ingo Metzmacher will be framed by the short, haunting orchestral work The Unanswered Question (1908). This is more than a piece of music – it is a philosophical riddle, a musical comment on human nature.