Sào Soulez Larivière, viola

An evening for curious ears

Experience the most exciting young personalities of the classical music world for a whole week – the Rising Stars Festival makes this possible. Chosen from the most famous concert halls in Europe, six excellent young musicians use the Elbphilharmonie Recital Hall to give the Hamburg audience sonic samples of their star potential. The festival kicks off with the Franco-Dutch violist Sào Soulez Larivière, whom the Elbphilharmonie itself nominated as its personal Rising Star for the 2024/25 season and who was already a guest in the »Teatime Classics« series. Larivière builds his programme around an equally rare and fascinating combination: the sonorous sound of the viola impacts on the kaleidoscope of sound of the percussion. The violist gets support from drummer and former Rising Star Christoph Sietzen – and this extraordinary line-up naturally does not offer standard repertoire, but a programme selection full of surprises and discoveries, which Larivière presents as a young artist with an open mind and mature personality.

Specifically for his Rising Stars concerts, a new work emerges by American composer Julia Wolfe, who was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Furthermore, the large-scale sonata for solo viola by György Ligeti Larivière offers ample opportunity to showcase the full range of his instrument in technique and expression.

The first half of the concert musically sounds out the relationship between nature and music: the spherical music of Armenian composers Tigran Mansurian and Komitas Vardapet give a musical voice to the eponymous birds and the piece »Naturale« by Luciano Berio adds viola and percussion to tape recordings of coarsely sung Sicilian folk songs.