The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with the support of the MCO Foundation, commissioned Søren Nils Eichberg to write a new piece that would highlight the chamber musical qualities of the orchestra, and the resulting work is Endorphin - Concerto Grosso for String Quartet and Chamber Orchestra. Eichberg dedicated Endorphin to Kolja Blacher, who will inaugurate the piece together with the MCO. The world premiere will take place in Landshut (15 Dec) and will be followed by two more performances in Neumarkt (16 Dec) and Viersen (18 Dec). The concert in Neumarkt will be recorded for release on CD after being broadcast live on Deutschlandradio.

Berlin, 9 December 2011 - For the second time in its 14-year history, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has awarded a commission for a new composition. The first commission, supported by the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, went to the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, who composed the oratorio Sternlose Nacht for orchestra, choir, and two soloists. First performed in October 2010 at Baden-Baden’s Festspielhaus, "the premiere (...) brought the public to a state of breathless attention", according to the newspaper Westfälische Nachrichten. "This was due in part to highly competent playing by the internationally active Mahler Chamber Orchestra under the baton of the engaged conductor Kent Nagano. Above all, however, it was due to the uniquely sensitive, tonally sensuous music of Hosokawa."

Now, thanks to the MCO Foundation, which was created in 2008, the orchestra has commissioned another new work, this time from the young German-Danish composer Søren Nils Eichberg. The MCO wanted a piece that would showcase its chamber musical qualities - the qualities that the MCO’s musicians consider fundamental to the orchestra’s style: highly sensitive listening and communicating in a group of independent musical personalities.

Søren Nils Eichberg was born in Stuttgart in 1973, grew up in Denmark, and now lives in Berlin. Since his breakthrough at the 2001 International Queen Elisabeth Composition Competition in Brussels, he has established himself as one of the most prominent and distinctive composers of his generation. Since then he has written more than thirty pieces, including two symphonies, four concertos, an opera, solo piano and chamber music. His œuvre has been performed throughout Europe, as well as in the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and has also been broadcast on radio stations across Europe and the U.S.

The composer chose the musical form of the concerto grosso: "my goal with Endorphin was to illuminate what it is about this traditional form that remains interesting for us today in a contemporary piece, and how this once-forgotten tradition can be rescued for our time," explains Eichberg. "In a concerto grosso, in contrast to a solo concerto, not only an individual soloist but a small group - in this case a string quartet - emerges out of the orchestra to perform. Sometimes the orchestra leads, sometimes the quartet. Sometimes they play against one another, sometimes together."

The title Endorphin refers to the "happiness hormone" produced by the human body. Eichberg continues: "Our own bodies reward us in certain situations - or stimulate us - with chemical substances that allow us to feel happiness; substances that are in fact very similar to dangerous drugs, which can lead people, despite their caution, to ruin. I found this ambivalence between euphoria and constant threat fitting for the atmosphere this music generated during the composition process: an ostensibly unadulterated joy in play and life, that nonetheless always threatens to be overturned, as it were, into something hidden, broken."

The premiere of Endorphin will be framed on the programme by two works of Beethoven: to open, Kolja Blacher and the MCO will play the "Kreutzer Sonata" in a seldom-heard adaptation for violin and string orchestra by Richard Tognetti. To conclude the concert, Blacher will lead the orchestra from the concertmaster’s chair in a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 1. The MCO has worked regularly for many years with Kolja Blacher, most recently on a recording of Schumann’s Violin Concerto that appeared last summer.