240 pages! The season preview of the Brandenburg an der Havel theater is a real briquette, almost as thick as the Berlin State Opera brochure for 2022/23. The Brandenburg stage does not even have its own ensemble of soloists. The opera, the spoken theater, the puppetry section, bit by bit the house was reduced in terms of personnel in various austerity rounds. In the meantime, only the orchestra is left, plus a brave little bunch in administration and technology. And yet the new director Alexander Busche wants to organize almost 400 of his own events in the coming season.

Born in 1978, Busche most recently managed the Göttinger Symphoniker, is a PR advisor to Bayreuth boss Katharina Wagner and has been many other things in his eventful career. Busche has now calculated in detail how he can get the maximum amount of art out of the limited resources at the Brandenburg City Theater – and he also uses his own labor intensively for this. In addition to his job as director, he also moderates his own series of “explanatory concerts”, in which he conveys basic knowledge to interested people of all ages in order to take away their fear of the supposedly elitist classical music.

And he will direct twice, with music theater works for which he has created his own versions: At the start of the season, Otto Nicolai’s opera “The Merry Weiber of Windsor” will be released on September 23, musically enriched with music by Viktor Ullmann and Arnold Schönberg, in a Production that will tell the original story, but does not show the Shakespearean hero Falstaff as a ridiculous drunkard and womanizer, but as a great lonely man in a mendacious company. At the turn of the year, Offenbach’s lonely island satire “Ba-ta-clan” should be more cheerful. Alexander Busche moves the action from fictional China to Berlin – and brings the one-act play with exoticism compositions by Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Saint- Saens full-length.

The musical specialist Andreas Gergen will also be represented twice in the new season at the Brandenburg Theater, in October with the touring production of his “Jekyll

Andrew Lipp’s sibling musical “John und Jen” comes from Off-Broadway, and in spring 2023 a freshly composed operetta can be experienced in Brandenburg. The doubly gifted tenor Daniel Behle wrote the score, peppered with allusions to music history, the libretto was written by the writer Alain Claude Sulzer: “Hopfen und Malz” is set in northern Germany, the plot is reminiscent of “Der Freischütz”. It’s about a secret recipe from the Caribbean monastery of Santo Demento that allows its owners to brew a great-tasting free beer that never runs dry.

These are all productions for which it might be worth taking the short train journey from Berlin to Brandenburg an der Havel. Just like for the homage to the composer Emilie Mayer, which the in-house orchestra offers in 2022/23. Although the Brandenburger Symphoniker perform regularly in Potsdam’s Nikolaisaal, their rediscovery of the “female Beethoven” can only be experienced in the parent company.

All six surviving symphonies, her piano concerto and the four major concert overtures by Emilie Meyer, who was born in Mecklenburg in 1812 as the daughter of a pharmacist, will be performed under different conductors – a unique opportunity to get to know this artist, who is of course much more than a female epigone of the great Ludwig van . The first professional composer whose works were performed throughout Europe. If you want to listen in: The conductor Marc Niemann has just recorded Emilie Mayer’s Symphonies No. 3 and No. 6 with the Bremerhaven Philharmonic Orchestra on the Haenssler Classics label.