Live at the Whitney Museum NYC, as part of the JG Thirlwell Composer Spotlight.
JG Thirlwell- Laptop and compositions
Leyna Marika Papach – Violin
Elena Moon Park – Violin
Karen Waltuch – Viola
Felix Fan – Cello
David Broome – Piano
David Cossin – Percussion
Filmed and edited by Jeff Davidson
SYMPHONY NO. 8 – for large orchestra was written in 2010-2011.
“8th Symphony was commissioned by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and is dedicated to this and conductor John Storgårds. First rate starts with sculptural up and down scales. The tonal result can be visualized, if you will, in spiral – and Zikkurat-forms. A playful, fast movement brings the term figure for that rate climax. Second rate is generally slow – and sensuous melodic. By turning scenes opened 3 pictures of a moving sound – melody and expression. 3rd rate starts in the biggest unrest, but creates gradually accelerating pace of increase towards this rate climax: a vibrating pianissimo shower completes the work …. and the symphony.”
- Per Nørgård (2012) [source]
Symphony No. 8 (2012) I Tempo giusto – Poco allegro, molto distinto
Per Nørgård (b. 1932)
John Storgårds, conductor
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Helsinki Music Centre concert hall, 20 September 2012
Symphony No. 8 was commissioned by the Helsinki Philharmonic. This is the second performance after the premiere on the previous night.
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, (born October 24, 1931) is a Russian composer of half Russian, half Tatar ethnicity. Until 1992, she lived in Moscow. Since then, she has made her primary residence in Germany, outside Hamburg. The Lyre Of Orpheus is composed in 2006, recorded July 2006 at Lockenhaus Festival and released in 2012 on the CD Canticle Of The Sun.
At a subterranean level, “The Lyre of Orpheus” is also an exploration into the physics of sound, with pulsating difference tones informing its underlying structures. Gubaidulina explains: “One can conceive of an imaginary pulsating space where the pulsation of the difference tones corresponds to the sounding intervals. Projected onto the tonal area which we can perceive, a specific correlation is formed between this pulsation and the sounding interval which produces the difference tone. One can experience this correspondence in an artistic work as a metaphor for a profound correlation between processes taking place in time and processes within the sound world, but also as a pronounced factor of formal organization.” [source]
Gubaidulina’s music is marked by the use of unusual instrumental combinations. In Erwartung combines percussion (bongos, güros,temple blocks, cymbals and tam-tams among others), bayan and saxophone quartet.
For Gubaidulina, music was an escape from the socio-political atmosphere of Soviet Russia. For this reason, she associated music with human transcendence and mystical spiritualism, which manifests itself as a longing inside the soul of humanity to locate its true being, a longing she continually tries to capture in her works. These abstract religious and mystical associations are concretized in Gubaidulina’s compositions in various ways. Gubaidulina is a convinced Russian-Orthodox believer. The influence of electronic music and improvisational techniques is exemplified in her unusual combination of contrasting elements, novel instrumentation, and the use of traditional Russian folk instruments in her solo and chamber works, such as De profundis for bayan, Et expecto- Sonata for bayan, and In croce for cello and organ or bayan.
Another influence of improvisation techniques can be found in her fascination with percussion instruments. She associates the indeterminate nature of percussive timbres with the mystical longing and the potential freedom of human transcendence.
A profoundly religious person, Gubaidulina defines “re-ligio” as re-legato or as restoration of the connection between oneself and the Absolute. She finds this re-connection through the artistic process and has developed a number of musical symbols to express her ideals. She does it through narrower means of intervallic and rhythmic relationship within the primary material of her works, by seeking to discover the depth and mysticism of the sound, as well as on a larger scale, through carefully thought architecture of musical form.
Gubaidulina notes that the two composers to whom she experiences a constant devotion are J.S. Bach and Webern. Among some non-musical influences of considerable import are Carl Jung (Swiss thinker and founder of analytical psychology) and Nikolaj Aleksandrovich Berdiaey (Russian religious philosopher, whose works were forbidden in USSR, but nevertheless found and studied by the composer). [source]
Gideon Kremer – violin
Marta Sudraba – cello
The Kremerata Baltica
By Ronnie Rocket, in Berlin-Charlottenburg and Copenhagen
This Sunday, the Danish National Museum will be the unique venue for a surprising matinee concert. The ensemble Eriko Makimura & Co. consisting of a tradtional chamber music format of piano and cello are joined by singers, actors and ballet dancers on the stage. Performing a set of compositions that are rarely played and adapted for the event, that is part of a charity concert series raising money for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
The event is named after the song by the German techno band Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, who just recently performed at DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen.
Here is the list of works. Below you will find recordings and videos of the original and/or previously recorded versions of the music as a “warm up” service for the show.
Time: Sunday October 2nd, 2011, 14:00.
Place: The Danish National Museum, Ny Vestergade 10 (main entrance), 1220 Copenhagen K.
Tickets: DKK 150 at the door (door opens at 13:00).
1. D.A.F.: Der Räuber und der Prinz
2. Henry Purcell: The Cold Song (inspired by Klaus Nomi)
3. Friedlich Hollaender: Falling In Love Again (inspired by Marlene Dietrich)
4. Rodion Shchedrin: A la Albeniz
5. John Cage: A Room
6. Margo Guryan: The Chopsticks Variations
The recital celebrated the release of Ms. Jansen’s latest CD, “Beau Soir,” a mostly French program (on Decca), and included a few of the pieces from the disc, as well as Franck’s A major Sonata, which is not on it. Ms. Jansen and Mr. Barnatan began with Ravel’s Sonata in G, a piece ideally suited to a Greenwich Village club, given its central “Blues” movement. They played it, with its bent pitches and fluid tempos, as if the blues were — at least for the moment — their musical mother tongue.
Elsewhere in the Ravel, Ms. Jansen’s centered tone and rich vibrato and Mr. Barnatan’s precise, crystalline sound yielded a refined intensity that put the “Blues” movement in its Parisian perspective. That quality also served Messiaen’s “Thème et Variations” particularly well.
Featuring Anthony Braxton 12+1tet, plus performances by Marilyn Crispell-Mark Dresser-Gerry Hemingway trio; Steve Coleman-Jonathan Finlayson duo, Nicole Mitchell, Richard Teitelbaum, Matthew Welch, John Zorn-Dave Douglas-Brad Jones-Gerry Hemingway quartet, and more special guests to be announced
The Tri-Centric Foundation presents a two-day benefit fundraiser event celebrating the artistic legacy of composer Anthony Braxton, in honor of his 65th birthday. In addition to rare NYC appearances by Braxton himself, the two concerts will feature a host of performers who have performed with or been deeply influenced by his music, playing both their own music and Braxton compositions. All proceeds will go to benefit the Tri-Centric Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to perpetuating and realizing the most ambitious projects in the ongoing work and legacy of composer Anthony Braxton, and to cultivating and inspiring the next generation of creative artists to pursue their own visions with the kind of idealism and integrity that Braxton has demonstrated thoughout his five decade career.
- At Le Poisson Rouge, June 18, doors will open at 5:30pm, and performers will include the Anthony Braxton 12+1tet, plus performances by Marilyn Crispell-Mark Dresser-Gerry Hemingway trio; Steve Coleman-Jonathan Finlayson duo, Nicole Mitchell, Richard Teitelbaum, Matthew Welch, John Zorn-Dave Douglas-Brad Jones-Gerry Hemingway quartet, and more special guests to be announced.
- At Issue Project Roon, June 19, doors will open at 5:30, and the performance will include excerpts from Braxton’s recently recorded four-act opera, Trillium E, in addition to sets featuring the recent generation of Braxton-influenced artists, including Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson & Jessica Pavone, Chris Jonas & James Fei, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Tyshawn Sorey, and many more musicians to be announced.
This is a general admission, standing event.
Anthony Braxton 12(+1)tet from Jason Guthartz on Vimeo.
The neomodernist musical movement that followed the second world war, and whose leading lights were Stockhausen, Boulez and Berio, was an undertaking of the highest seriousness. Not only was the language of music to be reconceived from top to bottom, and sideways, too, every work, it seemed, must have a global ambition. Stockhausen’s early scores — Kontra-Punkte, Gruppen, Carré, Kontakte, Momente, a grand progression — proposed, in each case, a new technique of composition and embodied it with monumental certi tude. Each was an enormous event, promptly recorded by Deutsche Grammophon, and intended to last. And, indeed, they have become the classics of “serialism”, along with such works as Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître or Berio’s music-theatre essay Laborintus II — not that they are performed as often as Mozart.
It was remarkable, therefore, a week ago to find that Laborintus II was being mounted by separate groups on successive nights: by the University of Birmingham’s Music Department in the Methodist Central Hall, Birmingham, and by the Aurora Orchestra with Mahogany Opera at LSO St Luke’s, in London. And, since the Birmingham concert was repeated the next day, their second Laborintus would have coincided exactly with the Aurora one. This wasn’t the only attraction of an unusual event called Squares, Circles, Labyrinths, directed by the composer Vic Hoyland. Stockhausen’s Carré was the first item, and between the two intervals of the triple-decker programme, the Birmingham University Singers, under Marcus Huxley, performed those pre-20th-century classics of “music in space”, Allegri’s Miserere and Tallis’s 40-voice motet Spem in alium.
For its (triumphantly resolved!) experiment with the spatialisation of sound is what makes Carré fascinating and gives it its title (“Square”). Four orchestras, each with its own conductor (Jonty Harrison, Lee Differ and Scott Wilson, along with Hoyland) play simul taneously, and ideas and gestures seem to move from one to another, circulating in the room, rather in the fashion of Gruppen, for three orchestras, but without that work’s minutely distinguished time streams. To Gruppen’s relentless dynamism, Carré opposes a contemplative relish of sonority for itself, although the climax near the end was every bit as shattering as a Gruppen high point.
Bangor New Music festival, held under the auspices of the university’s School of Music, celebrated its 10th anniversary with its most ambitious programme to date, and no concert signalled the event’s energy and range better than the one given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and featuring three firsts.
The school boasts three notable composers – Pwyll ap Siôn, Andrew Lewis and Guto Puw – and works by them made up the challenging first half. Ap Siôn’s Gwales, dating from 1995, pays homage to the late William Mathias, under whose aegis music flourished at Bangor. Building on fragments quoted from Mozart’s Requiem, the work depicts a journey towards the mythical island of Gwales.
In the first of the new pieces, Andrew Lewis also took us on a journey, this time in and out of consciousness. Number Nine Dream explored the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony through the hazy veil of the contemporary electro-acoustic sound-world, making for an absorbing aural experience.
When the O2 Arena was infamous as the Millennium Dome, Peter Gabriel’s music for its central show was one of its redeeming features, but the experience still left him feeling bruised. So he was brave, this weekend, to bring a new concept to the same venue. Scratch My Back, his most recent CD, is a set of cover versions, all performed with an orchestra. “No guitars, no drums,” runs its severe rubric.
The first half of the concert ran through the CD, in order, note for note and fault for fault. Some songs, notably Bowie’s “Heroes” and Paul Simon’s “The Boy In The Bubble”, are enervated by being stripped of pomp and swagger, although the former had a colourful passage of Reichian pulsing strings. Elbow’s “Mirrorball” has contorted melodies through which Gabriel would have sailed in his days with Genesis, but the kitschy orchestration muffled the key line: “We kissed like we invented it.” “The Book Of Love”, which in any case walks a fine line between the sincere and the sardonic, was trampled to death by headache-inducing cartoons.
But a couple survived. “My Body is a Cage”, originally by The Arcade Fire, had its relentless oppression screwed home with tiny taps of the triangle, while the backdrop flared with pictures of a throbbing atomic nucleus orbited by barbed wire. And “Listening Wind”, a newly topical Talking Heads song about insurgency and terrorism, grew spiky staccato string polyrhythms.
By Ivan Hewett
There are few string quartets I would bet I could spot in a blind test, but the Zehetmair Quartet is one. It’s not an ingratiating sound they make, but it is certainly hyper-alert, every phrase and every textural detail weighed and scrubbed clean of routine.
Combined with their appearance – all in black, with no music stands (the quartet plays from memory) – that sound tells you you’re in for something serious. That quality was especially vivid in Mozart’s slender G-major quartet, written when the composer was only 16. So much of its music consists of beautifully turned rococo clichés laid end to end, but they were so vividly characterised by the players that they seemed weighty and interesting.
After the Mozart came something genuinely dense, the 2nd quartet by the great Swiss oboist and composer Heinz Holliger.
Read the full review in The Telegraph here.
Listen to the 1st string quartet here:
