Das Bridges Kammerorchester kommt erneut ins Casals Forum
The transcultural Bridges Chamber Orchestra has been bringing together freelance musicians and their instruments from various regions of the European, Asian, and American continents since autumn 2019. The orchestra members are experts in Arabic, Persian, and European classical music, jazz, contemporary music, Eastern European folklore, as well as various forms of Central Asian and Latin American music.
The Bridges Chamber Orchestra is a unique ensemble in Europe: No other orchestra possesses such a large diversity of musical styles and origins of instruments, rehearsing continuously in a fixed formation, and presenting a variety of concerts in renowned venues with the highest musical expertise.
The 25-member orchestra consists of musicians from 15 nations and presents music styles from various traditions and interdisciplinary works equally in its concert programs. Fourteen out of 25 orchestra members compose and arrange a large part of the orchestra's repertoire themselves. The music traditions from which the musicians originate or with which they engage form the basis of the repertoire created by orchestra members for this unique ensemble, shaping the unique, constantly evolving transcultural sound language.
The Bridges Chamber Orchestra will make its debut in the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg in August 2024 as part of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and was included in the Bundesprogramm Exzellente Orchesterlandschaft Deutschland in 2024. Since September 2022, it has been Orchestra in Residence at the Casals Forum of the Kronberg Academy. In both 2022 and 2023, it was nominated for the shortlist of the Innovation Prize by the Deutsche Orchester-Stiftung. The Bridges Chamber Orchestra is among the winners of the Hessian Integration Prize and the Frankfurt Diversity and Integration Prize 2022, and for its debut album "Identigration" released in 2021 in co-production with hr, it received the German Record Critics' Award 2/2021 (Category “Grenzgänge“). In 2019, the Bridges Chamber Orchestra was honored as a nationwide beacon project for lived diversity and integration on equal terms with The Power of the Arts, one of the most highly endowed cultural funding prizes in Germany, as well as in 2018 with the Special Impact Prize of the KfW Foundation.