Antlitz

Program notes

About the Work

Antlitz is a new piece, and these performances are its first. Sarah Nemtsov wrote it in 2025 and 2026 to a commission from the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, shared with the Lucerne Festival and the Bayerische Staatsoper. Her own list of works gives it as a score for large orchestra lasting about twenty minutes.

The title is an old, elevated German word for the face: closer to “countenance” than to the everyday Gesicht, and familiar to German speakers from the language of the Bible and of poetry. Beyond the title, the scoring and the duration, nothing about the content of the piece had been published when this guide was written, so what follows describes the composer’s music in general and not this score in particular.

Nemtsov, born in Oldenburg in 1980 and based in Berlin, has written more than 150 works, among them several operas. Literature is a constant starting point for her, and she has drawn on writers including Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf. Her biography describes a musical language that takes in influences from Renaissance and Baroque music to jazz, rock and electronic music, and an interest in transitions and in-between states: between sound and noise, between instrument and electronics, between construction and chaos. Her most recent large orchestral project before this one was the tetralogy TZIMTZUM for soloists and orchestra, first performed complete in 2023.

What to Listen For

One detail of the scoring can be reported in advance. Alongside triple woodwind, full brass, harp and three percussionists, Nemtsov asks for an electric guitar, an instrument that appears in several of her orchestral works. It is worth listening for how it sits inside the orchestra, and for moments where it is hard to tell which instrument a sound is coming from.

In the concert the piece stands between two works that respond to religious images: Messiaen’s meditation on the Cross and the Eucharist, and Hindemith’s symphony on the painted panels of an altarpiece.