Kinder Sinfonie

Schon zu Beginn seiner Karriere ist es für den Pianisten Martin Stadtfeld zur Herzensangelegenheit geworden, Kinder und Jugendliche an die klassische Musik heranzuführen. So weckte er bereits die Neugier der Kinder und Jugendliche für die großen Komponisten mit seinem Album "Bachs Wohltemperiertes Klavier für Kinder". Nun legt Stadtfeld passend zum Beethoven-Jahr 2020 die Doppel-CD "Beethoven für Kinder" vor, auf der er als Pianist und Erzähler zu erleben ist.

Auf diesem Album begeistert der bekannte KiKa-Moderator Malte Arkona als »Orchester-Detektiv« ein junges Publikum. In einem Hörspiel mit der NDR Radiophilharmonie aus Hannover nahm er sich eines der bekanntesten Werke der klassischen Musik vor: die Fünfte Sinfonie von Ludwig van Beethoven. Auf originelle Weise werden Kinder zwischen 7 und 11 Jahren an einen Komponisten und ein großes Orchesterwerk herangeführt. Denn – welches Geheimnis steckt hinter dieser Komposition, die auf der ganzen Welt bekannt ist? Malte hat da eine ganz eigene Theorie – und vor allem einen schwerwiegenden Verdacht, den es zu beweisen gilt.

Carl Orff (German:[ɔʁf]; 10 July 1895 – 29 March 1982) was a German composer and music educator, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937). The concepts of his Schulwerk were influential for children's music education.
Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music and with the German composer Heinrich Kaminski and later conducted in Munich, Mannheim, and Darmstadt. His Schulwerk, a manual describing his method of conducting, was first published in 1930. Orff edited some 17th-century operas and in 1937 produced his secular oratorio Carmina Burana. Intended to be staged with dance, it was based on a manuscript of medieval poems. This work led to others inspired by Greek theatre and by medieval mystery plays, notably Catulli carmina (1943; Songs of Catullus) and Trionfo di Afrodite (1953; The Triumph of Aphrodite), which form a trilogy with Carmina Burana. His other works include an Easter cantata, Comoedia de Christi Resurrectione (1956); a nativity play, Ludus de nato infante mirificus (1960); and a trilogy of “music dramas”—Antigonae (1949), Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), and Prometheus (1966). Orff’s system of music education for children, largely based on developing a sense of rhythm through group exercise and performance with percussion instruments, has been widely adopted. In 1924 in Munich he founded, with the German gymnast Dorothee Günther, the Günther School for gymnastics, dance, and music.

National Socialism had devised its own notion of the value of German art and culture. This was ruthlessly put into practice when the Nazis took over power in 1933. The more than 175 "degenerate" recorded musical items in this extraordinary 10-CD box set, 'Forbidden But Not Forgotten', relate to the shocking consequences due to that "cleansing". The burning of the Reichstag (7th April) provided the pretext for the prosecution of all who held other political opinions, for the burning of books (10th May) whose authors were on the index of disfavoured and banned writers, for the law that amended entry to the civil service (7th April) that excluded all non-Aryans and led to wholesale dismissals of Jews, especially in orchestras, the administration, among singers, conductors and instrumentalists. By means of the exhibitions "Degenerate Art" (Munich, 1937) and "Degenerate Music" (Düsseldorf, 1938) art and artists who were now to have no place in Nazi Germany were pilloried.