Philipp Maintz

Philipp Maintz is “Composer in Focus” in Aachen

Philipp Maintz, born in Aachen, returns to his native city as “Composer in Focus” in a season for the anniversary of the Symphony Orchestra. The high point will be the world premiere of his orchestral work “ariadne faden”.

In the 2024/25 season the Theater Aachen celebrates its 200th anniversary. Appropriately, for its “Composer in Focus” Philipp Maintz, a local boy, has been chosen. Maintz was born in 1977 in Aachen, grew up and was educated there. That is where he took his first steps in music and made his first public appearance with his first compositions. He “almost lived at certain times” in the well-organised music section of the public library where he “worked through the history of music” (Maintz). Alongside scores by Berio, Penderecki, Reimann and Stockhausen he also encountered editions by his future publisher for the first time.

The composer has a special relationship to the Theater Aachen. Here, he saw his first contemporary opera, Marat by Walter Haupt – a “great spectacle” and an impressive and formative experience. From that day onwards he harboured the wish to also write such a great opera in “wide-screen format”. In 2008 his second orchestral work, archipel, was premiered by the Aachen Symphony Orchestra, and the composer still remembers the “tumultuous applause” after the performances. Two years later, the Theater Aachen produced Maintz’s first opera “Maldoror” with the Munich Biennale – a successful production which was also very well-received by audiences. “That was an exciting time and quite simply brought me a great deal of pleasure”, the composer recalls. His pleasure at being able to work with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra again is all the greater.

On 22 and 23 September the first German performances of the Concerto for Piano and Large Orchestra took place, conducted by Aachen Music Director Christopher Ward with pianist Joonas Ahonen. As well as a chamber concert and an ensemble concert, organ music by Philipp Maintz in Aachen Cathedral also features in the anniversary season programme. But the high point of the collaboration will be the first performance of his new orchestral work “ariadne faden” in the fourth Symphony Concert on 16 and 17 February 2025, conducted by Marc Niemann. As earlier in his preceding orchestral work “der zerfall einer illusion in farbige scherben” [The disintegration of an illusion into coloured shards] (world premiere: Cologne 22.6.2024), Maintz has again used an accordion in his new score, an instrument which is not typically found in the forces of a classical orchestra. Thus it can spin threads and lines, as it were “from outside”, which “stimulate the orchestra and make it bloom”. The special idea of the piece, hinted at in both the title and the subtitle, is the study of the classical form of sonata first movement form. The contemplation of the sequence of thesis – antithesis – synthesis experiences a new perspective alongside the formal and the melodic-harmonic – that of instrumental colour. This new perspective also says “something about our time, in the way that the unusual and the atypical can depict a special enrichment”. And it is no coincidence that the composer is preoccupied with this idea in this commission for the Aachen Symphony Orchestra: “For where better to unfold this narrative than with the orchestra of a city which lies in the centre of Europe and where, since my childhood, it has been completely natural to me to look beyond my own horizons.”
Robert Krampe

(translation: Elizabeth Robinson / from [t]akte 2/2024)