Magazine

Overwhelming possibilities: The GrauSchumacher Piano Duo plus orchestra

They perform classical concert repertoire, prevent works of the 20th century from sinking into oblivion, and continue to prompt composers to write new pieces for orchestra and two pianos: no other piano duo is currently taking to the stage with such a wide repertoire with orchestras. In the run-up to the world premiere of Luca Francesconi’s concerto for two pianos and orchestra Macchine in Echo, Götz Schumacher talks about the new work, world premieres during the last few years and the diversity of aesthetic strategies in concertos – from Bach to Berio and Mozart to Manoury.

Amid preparations for the work’s world premiere, which the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo will give together with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under the direction of Peter Rundel, Götz Schumacher appears enthusiastic about the Italian’s creation. “It’s a sensational piece”, he says. “This music has an intensity and a strength that to me seems almost unbearable, it’s so full and complex. But it is still transparent, well-balanced. There are unbelievable pianistic figures that demand exceptional skills but which, as a result, sound truly virtuosic.” In a short introductory text on his new work, Luca Francesconi describes his fascination for the piano – as an instrument and more so the sheer number of possibilities in duo-formation and when combined with an orchestra: “Hammers, mirrors, hits, concentric, retrograde, multiplications, inversions of ranges, harmonies, noise, rhythm, rotation, duel, resonance, extremes. Two pianos are frighteningly powerful.“

The piano does indeed seem to be an instrument that can do everything, that is able to depict a whole orchestra in all its polyphony. How do composers deal with the immense possibilities that are created when two of these instruments are available – plus a full symphony orchestra? “There are so many approaches. In Mozart’s music, for example, dialogue is very distinct”, explains Götz Schumacher. “In his music there’s a continual to and fro between the instruments: one piano finishes a phrase, the other begins the next playing it to the end of the phrase before the other answers in a different octave. A counterexample would be the music of Bartók or Eötvös who adopt a uniform piano sound and almost use the two pianos as a double instrument.” The pianist also observes many solutions regarding the role of the orchestra: “Bach relays an additional colour to the orchestra when it plays its tutti. Later, in Bernd Alois Zimmermann or Luciano Berio’s music, the orchestra is no longer there as a mass of instruments but also as a group of individuals – there is dialogue between the pianos and particular instruments. And by that point, the possibilities become overwhelmingly diverse.”

For many years, Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher have set themselves the task of reviving the boost that the Kontarsky brothers gave the repertoire for two pianos in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and firmly anchoring the milestones of that time in concert halls. Alongside numerous world premieres, the pianists have recorded almost all the major works for piano and orchestra, including concertos by Zimmermann, Berio, Rihm and Veress. This autumn, the third part of their Concerti series, a collaboration with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Deutschlandradio Kultur, will be released. The first two CDs feature concertos by Mozart, Bartók, Bach and Stravinsky, as well as composer Stefan Heucke’s arrangement of Liszt’s Concerto pathétique for two pianos and orchestra, a project which was prompted by the duo. The third CD in the series, which also includes Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for two pianos, presents repertoire from the 20th century and provides further evidence that most composers by no means use the “overwhelming possibilities” that Götz Schumacher described to create musical bombast. The Canadian composer Colin McPhee, whose concerto features on the new CD alongside that of John Adams, proceeds in a very unique way. “Colin McPhee creates a Balinese sound”, explains Götz Schumacher. “We take on the role of a gamelan in a way. The pianos blend with the sound of the full orchestra but are mostly closely intertwined with the percussion. In Adams’ work there’s another, very different, job to be done: embedded in his Minimal style he develops virtuosic gestures for both pianos, and in doing so quotes almost Beethoven-like cascades of sound. He dreams that the two grand pianos are two Cadillacs driving down the highway and generating a frenzy of sounds.”

According to Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, the repertoire profits from the fact that the piano is for most composers a highly trusted instrument that they use in their daily work and often have an excellent command of. “This joy of playing is very apparent with Philippe Manoury for example, himself a superbly trained pianist. You can tell from the music how well-written it is for the piano”, says Götz Schumacher. Philippe Manoury, who alongside fellow composers such as Peter Eötvös and Jan Müller-Wieland has dedicated a piano concerto to the duo in the last few years, seems excited about the collaboration: “The way they both immersed themselves in the music without having to ask any technical questions, I value this very highly. Of course I can answer such questions. But when the musical spark, which is the vital part of musical expression, no matter what technical means are being used, doesn’t ignite straight away, then something gets lost. With the duo everything was perfectly clear from the outset.” Götz Schumacher describes Philippe Manoury’s work as “highly virtuosic, spectacular and concise with a boisterous energy. This joy of playing is a development that we are rediscovering in Francesconi’s music – the passion to take full advantage of the piano’s potential. Virtuosity has effectively returned.”

Nina Rohlfs, 09/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Peter Rundel and the Remix Ensemble: Ready for New Challenges

There is a good excuse to party in Porto. This year, the Remix Ensemble celebrates 15 years since it was founded and ten years since the soloist ensemble for contemporary music moved into the new breathtaking Casa da Música concert hall. The ensemble’s artistic director, Peter Rundel, tells us the story of its early days and piques our interest in Remix`s latest project: an anniversary tour with a new opera by the Italian composer Francesco Filidei.

A commitment to trying new things and taking bold decisions was key to the ensemble’s astonishing success story, and allowed a soloist ensemble for contemporary music to be created for a building which had yet to be built: Casa da Música. “Remix was initially the only sure act that Casa da Música had for its opening,” explains Peter Rundel. “Pedro Burmester, the Portuguese pianist who initiated this concert hall, was sure that he wanted to forge a permanent collaboration between the hall and an ensemble for contemporary music.” The results were an international announcement and auditions across the whole of Europe. “Before the hall was even built, the musicians had already worked on it for five years,” says Peter Rundel, who took over from Stefan Asbury as director of the ensemble shortly before it moved into Casa da Música.

Of the many concert halls built in the past decades, Casa da Música is certainly one of the most interesting ones. Like a jewel perching up high, Rem Koolhaas and his renowned architectural office OMA’s geometric construction lies at the heart of Portugal’s economic hub. It boasts spectacular views, a variety of work spaces and of course an acoustically outstanding hall. It might be the kind of building that you would think had been created for the wealthier members of society – with a programme lining up large international orchestras and star soloists. Or else one that in its modernity might stand for a musical culture of the future, one that is available to a wider audience? “In the period following its opening, this kind of representative culture in the concert hall was the main policy,” admits Peter Rundel. But in the following years, more and more of the financial resources from foundation funds and government grants were used for the Casa’s own programme. “It was a clear move away from mere representation towards production.” Alongside Remix, other ensembles were gradually following suit and becoming part of the hall: for example, the previously independent Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto was taken on, and a chamber orchestra for early music with Lawrence Cummings as conductor was created. “Last but not least a choir conducted by Paul Hillier was founded, meaning that today the hall has four of its own ensembles. This is unique within Europe!”, Peter Rundel goes on to say. “It is also the result of a shrewd political decision to actively encourage regional artistic strengths.”

The fact that this cultural-political decision came at a time when a young generation of excellent musicians was entering the scene in Portugal was a stroke of luck for all of those involved. Of course, Remix is an international ensemble but it also enjoys a surprisingly high proportion of Portuguese members. “And one has to point out that this is because of the achievements”, Peter Rundel clarifies. “Young musical talent in Portugal is now on an international level. This is apparent at our auditions, at the Remix Ensemble’s summer academy and when we work with young soloists who perform at Casa da Música on various occasions.”

The programmatic concept of the concert hall is both distinct and transparent, matching the self-confidence of this new generation. Peter Rundel confirms that collaboration with Casa da Música’s artistic director, António Pacheco, is an important key to the Remix Ensemble’s success. “There is a clear focus on contemporary music – Remix is an important advocate of this – and there is an overall dramaturgical concept, for example focusing on a different country each season.” Not only pieces belonging to the respective country’s musical tradition take centre stage; prominent composers in residence also stand for these focal points. Helmut Lachenmann is currently the focus for Germany in this anniversary year, for example; in two years’ time Harrison Birtwistle will visit Porto, each visit being accompanied by performances by all of the in-house ensembles. “At the same time, every year we offer a young Portuguese composer the opportunity to present themselves to a wider audience”, Peter Rundel adds. “What is more, there is a series of “mini festivals” for all ensembles throughout the season, each with its own theme. This clear structure is very user-friendly for audiences and also allows for great diversity. Casa’s success rests on the concert hall and the concerts being very well received by as diverse a cross-section of Porto’s population as possible.”

This development would be good news for any city – and for Porto, the value of a functioning cultural centre that is able to give impetus to the musical life of a city beyond its own four walls is of the utmost importance. As Portugal’s economic centre, the world heritage city in the Douro region is an energetic urban space but it is also a place, which seems to lie on the edge of Europe from the perspective of European music metropolises – those who wish to go to concerts in other cities certainly have a long way to travel. By the same token, this situation has provided the Remix Ensemble with the specific wish to find its audience elsewhere. “From time to time we play in Lisbon at the Gulbenkian Foundation but Portugal is a small country with few performance opportunities”, Peter Rundel explains. “It’s all the more important for us that we have the possibility to face the competition and introduce ourselves to other audiences at European festivals for contemporary music or showcase our opera projects. This artistic challenge is very important for the ensemble and thanks to it we have taken a definite step forward in the last few years.”

The contemporary music theatre projects that the Remix Ensemble regularly presents on tours have caused a particular stir. “There’s a close collaboration with the French production company T&M - Théâtre et Musique”, explains Peter Rundel. “Wolfgang Mitterer’s Massacre was extremely successful for example; this year there’s even a revival of it in Toulouse after a long period. Then of course the Ring Saga four years ago, a mammoth project that could only be realised with the help of other partners.” The arrangement of Wagner’s Ring, boiled down to three days and to ensemble size, was seen across France and in Italy and was recorded by the television channel ARTE. “Following a break, we are now giving the world premiere of the first opera by the young Italian Francesco Filidei’s, surely one of the most interesting composers of his generation”, says Peter Rundel delightedly.

Giordano Bruno can be seen in Porto as an opera in twelve scenes from mid-September before Remix presents the work in Strasbourg and Reggio Emilia. “I think that Francesco Filidei succeeded in creating a musically absolutely brilliant work”, enthuses the conductor after the first rehearsal with singers and choir. “The material has been transformed with a hypnotic music.” The opera traces, on one level in the form of Stations of the Cross, the stages of the life of Giordano Bruno until his imprisonment by the Venetian inquisition and his burning at the stake, interspersed on a second level with the contemplation of Bruno’s spiritual universe. “The plot level is arranged around central tones and moves downwards chromatically, while the philosophical level moves upwards. As part of this stringent concept there are lots of references to sacred music and for me, the work touches on the tradition of the oratorio; it makes one think of pieces such as Haydn’s Letzte Worte or Schubert’s Lazarus. Still, Filidei has managed to create a completely unique soundscape.”

Giordano Bruno
Opera in two parts and twelve scenes by Franceso Filidei

12/9/2015
Porto, Casa da Música

19 and 20/9/2015
Strasbourg, Festival Musica

26/9/2015
Reggio Emilia, Teatro Valli

Nina Rohlfs, 8/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Breathing differently every evening: the conductor Alejo Pérez

The Argentinian conductor will make his debut at the Salzburg Festival in August with the Mozarteumorchester in concert performances of Massenet’s Werther. In the run-up to the festival, Alejo Pérez talked about the interaction between directors and conductors in opera productions, his love of language and literature, and magical moments on-stage.

Mr. Pérez, it is no secret that you are a big Mozart fan. Your debut in Salzburg will unfortunately be with Massenet…

AP: Not unfortunately (laughs). It’s true that I love Mozart with all my heart and that the invitation to come to Salzburg was a happy surprise. But I also feel very at home with French repertoire, which is why I am looking forward to conducting Werther with the Mozarteumorchester.

Is it true that your connection to the Salzburg Festival was established through the former artistic director Gérard Mortier?

I can only assume that. Gérard was always an extremely discreet man and never spoke of such suggestions on his part. But I can well imagine that this was the case. I liked Gérard a lot and he was always very generous to me.

You have regularly conducted at the Teatro Real Madrid since the 2010/11 season. This collaboration during Gérard Mortier’s tenure hinted at much more than a normal guest contract.

That was a system that Gérard Mortier favoured: there was a strong group of four or five regular conductors with whom he planned the seasons. He didn’t look for specialists in particular eras and styles but always looked for people who, in his eyes, had a command of all the relevant areas. He became a confidant for this small group of artists, very friendly and full of respect. The collaboration was ongoing; we planned three or four seasons in advance. I went to the theatre up to four times a year and was also on the panel at auditions. In this way I developed a permanent relationship with the orchestra, with the choir, with the whole house. It was a very special period for me.

After Gérard Mortier’s death in 2014 your relationship with Madrid did not end, however.

No, I have since been involved in projects that were not planned by Mortier.

As musical director of the Teatro Argentino in La Plata, where you pulled the artistic strings from 2009 to 2012 and conducted great works of the opera and concert repertoire, you were able to witness the productions first hand (in Madrid too, to a certain extent). Is it possible to get so close to a production as a normal guest conductor?

Only if you are in contact with the director from a very early stage. For me it’s ideal to meet him as soon as he starts developing his concept – if indeed he is open to that. Then right at the beginning of the staging rehearsal, and of course later as often as possible. It’s definitely crucial to not come in just at the end, as is unfortunately often the case in the opera world.

During the initial stages of a production, do you simply read up on the director’s concept or do you give your own input?

It’s always different. The exciting thing is that the action is contained in the music; a lot about the psychology of the characters is apparent in the music. It is difficult if the staging involves lots of conflicting meanings and the director claims that there is a different meaning behind the words that the singer sings. Sometimes this difference is simply not there in the music and that can lead to conflicts. Of course, I always do my best to make sure the production works well as a unity, not just on the musical side. In this respect I do intervene – respectfully, but most of all with respect for the work.

Alongside directors who enjoy this, there are doubtless some who are not so open to this kind of team work…

In my opinion, one can say anything one likes; you just have to choose your words more carefully. As long as my counterpart understands that I’m looking for the best for the work and not just for me, it’s not a problem. But it really depends and I have to admit that there are conflicts between directors and conductors – it’s even typical. You have to understand the director’s set of problems: during the performances they can’t change or influence anything anymore. Everything is then in the hands of the artists on-stage, the conductor in the orchestra pit and the director can only observe. It’s a difficult role.

Coincidentally, Peter Konwitschny’s staging of Rihm’s opera Die Eroberung von Mexiko will be running in Salzburg while you are rehearsing there. You will take over conducting this production next year in Cologne.

I already conducted the piece in a different staging at the Teatro Real and it’s very useful to see the production in Salzburg now and make inquiries: how was this or that problem solved? There really are a lot of difficulties in the piece, for which there is not necessarily one single solution.

Before that, you are involved in another large work: in December you will conduct Parsifal in your native Argentina at the Teatro Colón.

It was originally going to be staged by Katharina Wagner but in the interim the theatre direction changed and the new artistic director went for a different production. I have already worked on many operas with Marcelo Lombardero, who will now stage Parsifal. Naturally for me it’s exciting to be conducting Parsifal at the Colón.

Alongside the many operas, you have also conducted orchestral concerts with a range of renowned soloists in recent years.

There have been collaborations with artists that have shaped me greatly, even if it was just for one concert. Meeting Martha Argerich was a very special experience, so too was meeting Mischa Maisky. These were encounters with great musicians who have enormous expressiveness when they perform, and who also have very warm personalities.

It is probably very relaxing to be able to concentrate wholly on the music during concerts without the necessary communicative trimmings that come hand in hand with opera productions?

Of course. I love both. Although in opera you can also experience real magic. Sometimes it works better with some directors than with others – but, together with the singers and musicians, I definitely enjoy this feeling of ‘this evening it’s going to be different, without fail’. Sometimes the stars are aligned correctly and then it just happens: everyone listening together, picking up on every nuance as if playing chamber music rather than a four hour-long opera. There is a certain element of freedom involved, you breathe differently every evening. It is exciting to sense these subtleties and the enthusiasm of the many artists who are on-stage in front of you, and to react to this. It’s what makes the job exhilarating.

You can generally communicate with the musicians and singers in their mother tongues – alongside Spanish you also speak excellent Italian, French, English and German, and you are learning Russian. Do you go the extra mile to facilitate rehearsals?

I do it for the love of languages, of literature. I believe it enriches a person and you learn nuances and subtlety. When I was younger, I read a lot and it was a dream to frequently read in the original language. If it now benefits my work then that is obviously a great thing. I try very hard to get as close to the musicians as possible and to come across as naturally as possible with the help of language.

... and your language knowledge is also no doubt very useful regarding opera repertoire. Do you currently have your heart set on any particular repertoire that you would like to conduct in the near future?

When it comes to repertoire, I haven’t left any stone uncovered so far. I would like to exhaust, extend and intensify every possibility. German repertoire has always fascinated me – Strauss, Wagner, Mahler – and then of course the 20th century: Janáček, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. But there is so much more. French music… and so on. I could go on forever about composers whose works I would like to study.

Nina Rohlfs, 07/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Vanishing notes: Toshio Hosokawa‘s speech at the MozartLabor

On 31 May, Toshio Hosokawa was invited by the Mozartfest Würzburg to give a speech during the MozartLabor (Mozart Laboratory), a three-day symposium for academics, composers, musicians and music lovers. While describing his specific perspective on Mozart’s music, he took the opportunity to reflect on his own cultural and musical background, and on how Western and Japanese art deals with sorrow and mortality.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I would like to thank you first of all for the kind invitation to this wonderful Mozart Festival.

When I heard the well-informed and insightful comments of my dear friend and colleague Jörg Widmann, who spoke at last year’s MozartLabor, I thought it must have been a mistake that I received an invitation this year. Jörg’s physical presence alone was a clear indication of how he lives and breathes the European music tradition; he creates his own, new music from the heart of this tradition as it were.

I, on the other hand, grew up in Hiroshima in a family for which there was hardly any contact with European music. As a child I started to take piano lessons but this hardly went beyond a superficial level: what I experienced and learned in my lessons must have been fundamentally different from what one could learn in Europe, the world in which this music has its roots. Moreover, my family was characterised by traditional Japanese art – ikebana, tea ceremonies and Japanese music heritage. Yet in the 1960s, Western music found its way gradually even into this family. The music that Japanese children came into contact with at school was now almost entirely European, and they had practically no experience of traditional Japanese music. When I was younger I found the Japanese music that my grandfather and mother loved so much nothing other than bland and dull; I was much more fascinated and impressed by Western composition, particularly Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, and later the European moderns – Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy. In their music I felt something thrillingly modern, new and powerful.

It was towards the end of the 1970s during my studies in Berlin that I rediscovered traditional Japanese music. At that time there was a festival in the city that presented both the music of different peoples and cultures, and modern music and it was there that I first heard traditional Japanese music as “music”, touched by the idiosyncrasies and beauty of its soundscape. This was the first time that I had been away from home, a Japanese student studying abroad, and it was only through having this spatial distance that I was able to appreciate what was typically Japanese. Furthermore there was a particular reason why I was now able to appreciate traditional Japanese music with a new ear: I had encountered contemporary Western music and thus at the same time a way of listening to music that is different from the classical European tonal system of 18th and 19th century music. In 20th century Western music, it became necessary to not just observe the harmonic relationship between notes but also to capture the existence of the notes themselves – as an intrinsic value – and to develop an ear for the energy within them.

You, dear listeners, now know that my music is a far cry from the traditions of Western music and that it is from precisely this perspective that I appreciate and cherish Western music. However, at the same time I cultivate my own musical language, based on my feeling of being rooted in traditional Japanese music and, thus trying to create a new kind of music. It may be that I succeeded in discovering the potential of a non-Western music only through this experience of the other, the culturally different.

Enough about the background of my experiences for the time being. I am not sure what I can even tell you – lovers and researchers of Mozart’s music – with this background; but I would like to try to explain to you how I hear Mozart’s music and what I love about it.

As you may know, “Ikebana” is the Japanese art of flower arranging. Flowers are arranged and displayed in a particular room in the house and a specific world view is unfurled, which is quite different from European flower arrangements. There are lots of flowers on display at this Mozart Festival. I believe we do this to make the rooms seem more sumptuous and at the same time to insert some of the beauty of nature into the human world as decoration. In Japan one often sees these sorts of flower decorations. But the actual, traditional art of Ikebana is very different from this sort of flower arrangement.

In Ikebana, the flowers are seen as things that have been cut from the fields and brought into a room that people live in. These flowers breathed in the earth, but their “lives” have been cut off; death is already there in the background. And as one makes the last shimmer of their lives palpable in the room, life’s worth – the ability to have an effect and to resist – becomes all the more apparent. These flowers do not make a lush bouquet, the aim is to bring out just one flower or place a couple of them together. It is very important where these flowers are placed: the background becomes an essential part of the arrangement.

We Japanese find the volatility of passing things beautiful. That is why we love “Sakura”, the cherry blossom in the spring. These cherries are not edible. And the flowering season is very short. They blossom for four to five days at the most then the flowers fall. It is precisely this process of falling petals that we find beautiful. Because our own lives do not last forever; they blossom for a short time only to vanish. We feel this is precious thanks to this awareness of fleetingness.

I believe there are two different sorts of aesthetics in art: firstly art that resists mortality and disappearance, and secondly art that faces up to vanishing time and mortality. In Europe, many art forms seem to have grown out of a resistance against time passing by. This corresponds to the Christian belief that God gave man eternal life. In this way Bruckner’s symphonies, for example, seem to me to anticipate something like eternity in their “sound architecture”.

But what is a note? It comes and it goes. It is born from silence and sinks back into silence. Our traditional Japanese music is based on the prerequisite of the tone’s evanescence, of its inherent perishability. We hear the individual notes and appreciate at the same time the process of how the notes are born and die: a sound landscape of continual “becoming” that is animated in itself. The silence in the background of the sound has an essential meaning at all times.

When I am composing, I present my music as calligraphy in space and time. In Asian calligraphy you use a paintbrush and a white fabric to draw lines. The white area – the empty space on the fabric – is just as important as the lines themselves. I once met a leading Zen doyen who did calligraphy every day. One time, he drew the Chinese character “do” (the way) on a large white canvas for me. He said: “Calligraphy is not about starting to draw on paper straight away. Instead you define a point in the empty space and from this point you start to draw, finally returning to that point. This circling-linear movement is calligraphy.” This idea had a fundamental impact on my music.

The musical movement also begins before you hear anything. The notes we hear are much more of an indication of a deeper inaudible world.

In the traditional Japanese art of poetry there is the term “mononoaware” (loosely translated as a nostalgic/wistful feeling for the transience of things). This does not simply contain sadness but also an attitude of valuing everything that is transient. In the depths of human existence there is a bottomless darkness but there is also an attitude that this finite, fragile existence must be perceived with love and appreciation. In darkness there is also the brightness of “resignation”.

Perhaps it is just my subjective perception but I hear this “mononoaware” in Mozart’s music; a feeling of sorrow and deep resignation towards passing life and time. It is an attitude that transcends the self, an attitude not to hold on to the notion of eternity. His clarinet concerto or quintet are examples of where this love of transience can be felt. The “sorrow” in this music is like a transparent, clear sky on an autumn’s day.

In my opinion, Mozart’s music is not created through a “self”; it appears as if from another, otherworldly sphere, just as if it were only audible through the – carefully listening – medium of Mozart. I also love the magnificent music of Beethoven but I always get the impression that a strong “self” is struggling against the transience of this music. Compared to that, I think the genius Mozart examined how notes naturally flow; he shows this in the most beautiful way in his music.

Perhaps it is my subjective perception. I do think, however, that there is a kind of resonance that goes beyond the boundaries between the Western and Eastern worlds in really exceptional artistic expression. Mozart’s music seems to me to be such a transcendental, borderless art.

Today I have tried to explain how I appreciate and perceive the music of Mozart from the point of view of traditional Japanese music.

Thank you for listening.

Toshio Hosokawa

Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Encounters and Reflection: Jens Joneleit in Russia

The Osnabrücker Symphonieorchester and Academic Symphony Orchestra Volgograd commemorated the victims of war and terror in recent months with concerts to mark 70 years since the end of the Second World War, thereby creating scope for exchange, discussion and mourning. In May, the composer Jens Joneleit  accompanied the orchestras and his work Ehrfurcht (Andacht) (“Veneration (Reverence)”), composed especially for the occasion, to Moscow and Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). He took the opportunity to discuss his piece, hear opinions on the current political situation and talk to war veterans about their experiences.

The performance of the work on 9 May at the site of the crushing German defeat in 1943, today one of Russia’s most important memorials, was also attended by the German Minister for Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was in Russia on a state visit, and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov. Together with approximately 10,000 other audience-members, they heard a light, restful piece that in no way tried to depict the horrors of war. “I didn’t want to depict the end of the war with a particular atmosphere,” explains Jens Joneleit. “The music ought instead to bring something of the present day to this period in time. As I tackled the topic through the Osnabrück orchestra’s commission, my own family history played an important role – my grandfather was a soldier in Russia, a parson in the field. After this experience he always had the urge to convey to me the horrors of war, the senselessness, the terror.” But the overall tone of his piece is influenced most of all by his grandmother’s stories. “She said that when war is over, it’s not like a light switch that you can turn off. It takes a long time to come to terms with the horrors that one witnessed. In the first few weeks a sense of ambivalence dominates, there’s an uncertainty as to whether peace will remain or whether war will flare up again. I tried to convey this in my music. The listener is transported to a place where he can feel that something is shifting, something is becoming lighter but something black appears – and then it remains grey. This limewash grey, between black and white, this uncertainty is the central theme of my composition.”

It seemed as though the project would come to an abrupt end when the political situation in Ukraine escalated. “Shortly after I started composing, there were protests in Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti square,” explains Jens Joneleit. After the Crimean crisis and the shooting down of the aeroplane over eastern Ukraine, sponsors pulled out. “So for me there was also an acute, very concrete state of uncertainty. I had composed two thirds of the piece and didn’t know if it would ever be played.” Feelings of ambivalence and uncertainty oversaw the compositional process all the more when he travelled to eastern Ukraine three times on private visits. “It was very distressing looking into the empty faces of Ukrainian soldiers who couldn’t look you in the eye when you talked to them. It really shocked me: I’m writing a piece to mark 70 years since the end of the Second World War and here I am now, a 46 year-old in the middle of Europe, talking to a Ukrainian soldier in front of a T-72 battle tank that is fully loaded and ready to be fired.” The memories and stories of his grandfather, who was stationed near Kiev, also accompanied Jens Joneleit on these visits. “That I was now following in his footsteps with my piece, in the very region where the war ended 70 years ago and where a new war is now taking place, was a strange and appalling feeling. The awareness that the current situation can change at any moment is also in the piece.”

One can be sure that concerts are rarely as politically and emotionally charged as the joint performances in Moscow and Volgograd, programmes rarely discussed so critically about their suitability for the historical situation. And yet before the two orchestras travelled to Russia with the piece, concerns were brought to Jens Joneleit’s attention that his tranquil and reverent piece might be met with rejection. This is because, despite the loss of approximately 26 million Soviet citizens in the Second World War, 9 May is celebrated as Victory Day in Russia, with fireworks, military parades and expressions of thanks and flowers for the veterans. A confrontational interviewer for Russian television boiled the doubts down to the reproach: “We are celebrating and you are offering us a requiem”. Jens Joneleit retorted with, “But I can’t come with victory music,” and talked about how the soldiers of the Soviet Army pushed the Germans further and further back until they put an end to the Nazi horror. “I am the result of their acts,” he says. “My parents’ generation grew up in the rubble of war. They knew exactly why there was rubble: the Germans instigated a colossal war. They passed on this legacy, this coming to terms to their children. And the veterans often grasped this much quicker than listeners who were born after the war. They felt more provoked with regard to the tone of my music.”

“However, these were only solitary experiences,” he concedes and says that he has never given so many autographs than on this trip. “And when you’re giving out autographs, people ask critical questions too. They want to know something from you, they won’t just go to the concert and say, ah a world premiere, how nice.” His encounters with war veterans were particularly moving. “Lots of veterans came to me after the concert in Volgograd and embraced me, half crying half laughing. Just the fact that we were there, taking into account the crisis in Ukraine, made them very happy. Many of them said they cannot comprehend what is happening at the moment – this playing with fire. One has to give it to the Soviet veterans: they have a bigger perspective than the younger generation in Russia.”

Those who seemed to call for triumphant victory music the least were the veterans of all people. “They were the ones who said, Jens, you’ve hit the right note,” says the composer. “For many of them, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 was simply too loud.” The “Leningrad” symphony, that was completed a few weeks after the German attack on the Soviet Union, was the second work on the programme in Moscow and Volgograd. “It’s music that aimed to inspire listeners at the time not to give up and naturally has a very different tone compared to my work. The difference couldn’t be more extreme.” Before the tour, Jens Joneleit favoured the eighth symphony. “Shostakovich wrote the eighth to throw critical light on his seventh and his perspective at the time. It is also victory music but above all it reveals the torments of war. He experienced the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad but fled shortly afterwards to the east. There, no one had the foggiest idea what it was like on the front. He was shocked after speaking to injured Soviet citizens and regretted having engulfed people in the war and in their misery with his seventh symphony that was so apt to be used as propaganda. This critical tone is evident in the eighth.” In Moscow, Jens Joneleit observed that many concert-goers shared his opinion. “Russians who are familiar with music know about Shostakovich and the problems he had with the Soviet state. Many said, but we have music for this occasion! The eighth symphony contains music composed with a critical eye, why isn’t that being played?“

It was not only the music connoisseurs in the audience who welcomed the stark contrast of Ehrfurcht (Andacht) alongside the symphony. “Many were glad to hear a piece that permitted mourning. Of course 9 May is a victory day in Russia. But the celebrating and the fireworks cannot be mentally endured year after year. A veteran said to me: ‘Finally someone is giving me something to make me cry.’ I found that phenomenal and it just goes to show that this project was really worthwhile.”

And this is how Jens Joneleit sums up the experience, despite his sympathy for the reluctance and ambivalence of the German politicians who struggled with visits to Russia to commemorate the Second World War given the current crisis: “I personally find it momentous that we took the step to go there and to carry on with the project, and I also think it is good that the commemoration was interwoven with the current situation. That is why we have these occasions and memorials: to ensure something like this never happens again.”

Nina Rohlfs, 06/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

From Gyeonggi to Berlin: in conversation with Shiyeon Sung

The Korean conductor Shiyeon Sung has held her first post as Chief Conductor since January 2014 with the Gyeonggi Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra is now touring Germany, taking in the Berlin Philharmonie, the city of Wiesbaden and the Musikfestspiele Saar. Shiyeon Sung is therefore leading her orchestra to the country where she learnt her conducting trade and where she acquired her reputation as one the most exciting emerging talents on the international music scene.

In 2006, after graduating from the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin, she won two conducting competitions in quick succession: the International Conductors‘ Competition Sir Georg Solti and the Gustav Mahler Conductors‘ Competition. Since then, the former assistant of James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra is regularly invited to guest conduct international orchestras, enjoys close ties with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra – and is now facing new challenges with her own orchestra.

Ms. Sung, can you tell us something about your Gyeonggi Philharmonic Orchestra?

Gyeonggi-do is South Korea’s most populous province and at its centre, 30 minutes by car from our orchestra’s base, is Seoul. Our orchestra belongs to this region, the area that surrounds Seoul. It is now 19 years old, so still relatively young. The approximately 100 musicians are also fairly young, on average around 35 years old. We only have a few youth orchestras in Korea; the system is a bit different to that in Germany. That’s why many musicians come directly to us after their studies in Europe or America and gain intensive orchestral experience here for the first time. That’s a big challenge for them but at the same time we have a lot of fun! I can say that, as a result, they are really spirited and highly motivated. You don’t just sit comfortably in your chair and do the bare necessities; everyone is very committed to and passionate about the music.

Does the repertoire have any particular focal points?

Our strength is the late Romantic repertoire. We do also discover new works though and want to perform more contemporary music. At the moment I’m trying to develop a composer residency and a Korean composer, Heera Kim, is accompanying us to our performances in Germany. She studied under Wolfgang Rihm and in her piece, of which we are performing the German premiere, one can really get a sense of his influence. I think that nowadays we have to preserve classical performance practice but at the same time it is our duty to attract new audiences and provide younger generations with new works to discover.

Concert audiences in Germany are getting older – is the same phenomenon occurring in Korea?

Not exactly. But it is indeed true that we don’t sing as much at school any more and there isn’t as much music-making at home as there used to be. Therefore the younger generation has less contact with live music. I think that it’s possible to change a lot with music. I believe in that and that’s why I try out new things. I’m planning, for example, to work on Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Soldat Mahagonny with a well-known film producer to awaken interest in normal audiences rather than just classical music lovers.

It appears that Korean and European orchestras face similar challenges. What makes the mutual exchange interesting for both sides? And what could make a Korean orchestra stand out for audiences in Europe?

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say this since there is always a particular aesthetic and emotional significance in music… But I think that the Korean mentality is simply more emotional than it is rational. The orchestra is capable of creating wonderful moments and as a Korean, I can immediately feel this emotional opening up and commitment.

That doesn’t fit the stereotype that Europeans have of Asian people at all; we tend to think that you are more reserved.

There is a further aspect: in Korea we have a word – han – which cannot be translated. It is a very specific Korean mentality or emotion because we were often suppressed as a small country located between China and Japan, although our culture was very developed. The Koreans suffered a lot because of this. Without really being able to express it, “han” is present in every art form.

In Korea there is also a particular interest in the history of divided Germany. Will this play a role for the orchestra during its visit to Berlin?

The concert in the Berlin Philharmonie will take place on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japan. It is a great opportunity for us to mark this in Germany. Furthermore many of the musicians, including myself, have studied in Germany, some even in Berlin, and are looking forward to seeing the city again.

Before the orchestra performs with the violin virtuoso Suyoen Kim in Berlin, it can be seen at the Musikfestspiele Saar and in Wiesbaden with Wieniawski’s violin concerto performed by Albena Danailova, and Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 2. How did this programme come to be?

The Saarland Festival this year focuses on Poland, which is why they asked us to perform a Polish programme. But we thought, not everyone wants to hear us play solely Polish music. With Heera Kim’s piece we can prove that our contemporary composers also have something to say. Last June we performed Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 4 and I found the work really interesting and unbelievably well written. That’s why I wanted to do another work by him so that we have the opportunity to show our emotional side. The concert in Berlin will include Tchaikovsky, then it will become Russian too (laughs).

How does working with your own orchestra differ from your previous work as a guest conductor?

From my point of view it is a very productive time. You always have a certain adjustment period when guest conducting as you get to know the orchestra. Then after two days the concert is upon you and you move on to the next orchestra. But with your own orchestra – and particularly when you work with highly motivated people – you can try out lots of things. By that I don’t mean trying out new techniques but feeling my capacity. How much am I giving and how much am I getting back in terms of energy and response? And at the next concert I can focus on a different thing. How can I move the baton perhaps just two centimetres and still take charge of the orchestra? These things can be developed more intensely with one’s own orchestra – and then applied to other orchestras. The other thing is that I’m learning a lot about the organisation of the orchestra, planning projects in the near future and making long-term decisions. In Germany it’s not usually necessary for chief conductors to deal so intensively with these questions but in the US for example, it is extremely important that the chief appears and is involved. I myself am working diligently on creating a network of sponsors and securing financial backing. All of this is a great learning curve for me.

Nina Rohlfs, 05/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

New Roles: Tora Augestad in Norway

Tora Augestad welcomes me into her Berlin apartment. Between performances of Christoph Marthaler’s music theatre piece Tessa Blomstedt gibt nicht auf at the Berlin Volksbühne and her guest performances at the Royal Opera House London with Marthaler’s King Size, she is currently catching her breath and is using the time to prepare for new projects. The score of the opera Adam and Eve – A Divine Comedy is lying on her piano; she will give the world premiere of the work, composed by Cecilie Ore and commissioned by Tora Augestad herself, at the Bergen International Festival on 28 May. She says that God speaks more or less throughout the whole opera and flicking through the music, she quotes some extracts.

TA: “The women and the little ones, the livestock and everything else in the city, all is spoil of war, you shall take as plunder for yourself, and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemy, which the Lord, your God, has given you.” That part’s about rape. Another passage deals with women covering their heads: “If a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her hair. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image of glory of God, but a woman is the glory of man, for man was not made from woman, but woman from man.”

These quotes sound outrageous. What is the opera’s objective? It has been advertised as a “burlesque chamber opera”…

TA: The criticism in Adam and Eve does not refer to Islam but to religion in general. That’s why there are passages from the Old and New Testaments, so Jewish and Christian texts, as well as texts from the Koran. It examines how religion is used to oppress women. This is unfortunately unbelievably topical at the moment. Some say, for example, that it is worse now for women in Iraq than it was under Saddam Hussein. It’s hard to believe. The same is true in Afghanistan. And at the same time there are men and women in our society, in Germany and Norway, who say, “Enough with this feminism. It’s too much. This is taking equality too far.“ But how can equality go too far? In Norway, if you think it’s unfair that as a woman you earn less than your male counterpart, people say, “You’ve got so many rights. Think of the women in Iraq, in Afghanistan, they’ve got it hard.” For me feminism means only one thing: solidarity. If we change what we can at home, it doesn’t for one second mean that we don’t show solidarity with other women. I’m a singer, for example. This would be impossible if I were Iranian because over there it’s illegal to be a solo singer. I think of this a lot. Of course Adam and Eve deals with difficult subject matter but it is such an important topic. I think we’re going to get a lot of reactions to this.

How is the subject matter dealt with in the work and in the staging?

The music is quite minimalistic. There is a lot of repetition in the text, everything is repeated and the same is true of the music. I think it will feel a bit like being in a cage. I’m intrigued as to how the piece will develop during rehearsals; the material is really intense but it has to be funny at the same time. The director Susanne Øglænd has some great ideas; the audience will sit like a jury at court in the concert hall, for example.

At this year’s Bergen Festival, you are not just appearing in this world premiere. You can also be seen in Christoph Marthaler’s staged Lieder recital King Size, with which you have been touring Europe. What does the festival mean to you?

Bergen is my home town and I’ve grown up with the festival as it were. As a teenager, I always waited with anticipation for the programme to be published and bought tickets for performances. I first appeared as a soloist there just a few years ago and then again in 2013 with my band Music for a While. That was a great success. This year I’m also taking part in a few smaller projects alongside the big productions. I’ll be at the opening concert and will take part in a discussion about music theatre, for example. I have a good bond with the festival and the artistic director Anders Beyer. In the coming year I’m curating something else: a cabaret late night performance inspired by Schönberg in which I will also sing.

Curating and working as artistic director is nothing new for you; you are also co-directing the Hardanger Festival. How do you feel in this role?

I love programming. I used to have my own festival in Norway and can imagine leading larger festivals too at some point in the future. Why not? I’ve worked in a wide range of areas – in theatres, opera houses, with large ensembles, small ensembles… You really get to know the scene when you work as a freelancer, as I do, and are continuously on the move. You make useful contacts, listen to lots of music and gain invaluable experience.

As artistic director in Hardanger, you now not only profit from this know-how but also from your sound knowledge of the German music scene.

It’s funny that the Hardanger Festival’s theme this year is Germany of all things. It wasn’t my idea – it had already been decided before I took over the artistic direction alongside Terese Birkelund Ulvo. Together we found a good mixture with several programmes that address Germany: “Brecht as a Poet” involves two actors and the accordionist Stian Carstensen, then there’s a discussion accompanied by music with the journalist Sten Inge Jørgensen who has written a book entitled “Tyskland stiger frem” (“Germany Emerges”). And of course there are lots of concerts with music by German composers from Bach through to Hindemith and Lachenmann. In total there are about 35 events over the course of five days, as well as children’s concerts and performances in retirement homes.

The Hardanger Festival is actually a festival for classical chamber music. Many of the concerts, including performances by your band Music for a While, do not fall into this category strictly speaking. Are you moving away from the festival’s original profile or are such things generally less strict in Norway?

The Norwegian music scene is certainly more open regarding categorisation but you’re right that there are lots of crossover events this year. Classical music does remain at the heart of the festival however, and Norwegian folk music also plays a central role. It was important for us to further establish the festival in Hardanger. We would like to reach the people who live in the region and not only tourists who travel here just for the festival.

You yourself commute between Norway, your Berlin home and other international engagements. How much time do you spend in your native country?

I’m working quite a lot in Norway this year and I’d guess I spent a quarter of my time there in the current season. However all in all, I’m spending more and more time in Germany and I like that. It can’t be denied that Germany is currently the leading European country when it comes to culture. It has the most orchestras, there is money to be invested in culture and above all there are interested audiences who are culturally educated. But I will always continue to have projects in Norway in the future, although my profile is slowly changing. My two last albums with Music for a While already took a new direction: instead of jazz and cabaret we recorded arrangements of classical pieces. In Norway overall, I have a reputation of being a singer who does many highly varied things throughout Europe.

Adam and Eve – A Divine Comedy
28 and 29/5/2015, 19:30
Bergen, Logen Teater

King Size – Enharmonic Changes
2 and 3/6/2015, 19:30
Bergen, Den Nationale Scene

Hardanger Musikkfest
21 – 25/5/2015

Nina Rohlfs, 04/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Tabea Zimmermann in conversation about Enno Poppe

In three concerts in April, Tabea Zimmermann will perform Enno Poppe’s new viola concerto Filz together with Ensemble Resonanz. On this occasion, the violist talked with Till Knipper about the first encounter with new works, about whether having perfect pitch is a blessing or a curse and about why music-making and authoritarian structures are incompatible.

Many prestigious composers have written works for you. As one can imagine, performing new pieces always means a considerable extra effort. Why do you do this to yourself?
“Extra effort” sounds funny to me! Because I am constantly rehearsing and working on new pieces. I enjoy cracking hard nuts for several reasons. For one thing, it helps me avoid falling into routine. Also there is nothing better than achieving in-depth insight and gaining more experience. I enjoy new music, and this also makes me look at well-known music from a new perspective.

Did you and Enno Poppe try out new techniques on your instrument?
We met last winter in Berlin, and we did try out some sounds together back then. Enno Poppe already had a clear idea of a dynamic sound that he was looking for. I remember that I was quite fascinated about the sound’s kinship to the Chinese instrument Erhu.

In an interview you said about Filz: “I had to learn to play the viola again.” Why?
Because I can’t think of any other work for viola that is so focused on glissando. I have absolute pitch – which is a blessing most of the time, but it also can be a curse –, and this certainly helps me to image the music that I see in the score in the correct pitch. Poppe has composed a process of tones that is constantly changing – and I had to work this out from scratch, which I found very rewarding. Currently I am generally interested in “the way from somewhere” and in “the way to somewhere”. So Poppe’s work came at the right time.

In what way does Filz refer to the tradition?
I do see Filz in the tradition of other “good” music! Poppe does not reinvent the wheel. He uses readable staves (luckily!), and he refers to well-known note values and pitches. Only the timbre with a solo viola, 18 solo strings and four clarinets, respectively bass clarinets, is extraordinary: there has never been anything like that and this is very exciting!

What do you associate in the music with the title Filz (felt)?
I don’t think I can answer this question properly before the rehearsal period with Ensemble Resonanz has begun. Currently everything is pure imagination (and hard work). But from my conversations with Enno Poppe I would think that felt as a material and the density of it can definitely be recognised in the music.

What would you like to change about the music scene?
I would like to contribute to making the old, patriarchal structures in society and in music superfluous! In terms of music this means: I don't enjoy working with conductors who see themselves as the centre of everything. Both musicians from ensembles like Ensemble Resonanz, Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Ensemble Modern and musicians from “normal” orchestras – they all enjoy participating in the musical process much more when there is less hierarchy, they all enjoy a music director that embraces participation and provides an artistic direction at the same time.

This is what older conductors like Claudio Abbado or Simon Rattle and artists from the younger generation such as François-Xavier Roth und Yannick Nézet-Séguin stand for. You feel that they regard themselves as a kind of catalyzer. They motivate musicians to achieve the highest levels through their knowledge, their ear and they sensitivity – and not through fear. The conductor as a leader, as a boss of his musical staff – this is obsolete. Music-making and authoritarianism are incompatible! If I can make a small contribution towards changing this situation by playing concerts with a chamber music sense of cooperation, I would be very happy.

To which projects are you particularly looking forward to?
As I am fortunate enough to be able to decide myself which concerts to play and which not to play, I am actually looking forward to all the dates in my calendar! Which is: Bartók with François-Xavier Roth in Helsinki (1 April), the world premiere and additional performances of Poppe’s Filz in Vienna, Cologne and Hamburg (11-15 April), concerts with the Arcanto Quartett, recitals with Javier Perianes. Additionally I am going to teach a master class again after a long time, this time within the framework of the Schleswig-Holstein-Musikfestival.

Interview: Till Knipper

Feedback for conductors: Steven Sloane and the International Conducting Academy Berlin

After the successful first round in the academic year 2014/15, young conductors can again apply for an internationally unique programme at Berlin’s University of the Arts (UdK): The International Conducting Academy Berlin (ICAB), conceived and directed by Steven Sloane, offers, alongside a two-year master's degree programme, a one-year postgraduate course, specifically tailored to the individual needs of the participants. It offers conductors with first work experience, who are already beyond the master’s level, a very focused way to improve upon their capabilities, benefitting from a variety of collaborations with orchestras and opera houses in Berlin and other German cities.

Pablo Rus Broseta, one of the first two students of the Advanced Professional Training for Conductors, explains why it was the right decision for him as a professionally successful young conductor to again spend time at a University. "It's true that I am already conducting important concerts. However, life as a conductor can suddenly be very lonely. No one comes to you and says, be careful in this bar, maybe you should try this technique. I have certainly conducted at a professional level before but during this year, I can still evolve a lot thanks to the great feedback."

“Usually there is only one conductor in the room," says Harry Curtis, who, as teacher and course coordinator for the ICAB, keeps the many organisational threads of the study programme in hand. "The musicians in front of you notice if something doesn’t work out. But they can’t tell you why! It is this information that the students get from us. The Academy therefore aims to create a platform that puts them in a live situation as often as possible – but not without help," he says. For Pablo Rus Broseta’s agenda, this means: "At the beginning of the semester, I look at the plan and I see, for example, that in October we will travel to the orchestras in Frankfurt and Brandenburg. So, let’s say in one month you have two different repertoires. This is a lot of work, but it prepares you for professional life in the future. Because normally if things go well, you have a lot to do and a lot to study in a very short time.”

The info leaflet promoting the University of the Arts’ new course describes the etymology of the verb ‘to conduct’: originally it means, ‘to bring together’. And this is exactly what the ICAB does. Both within the university and in relation to the cultural opportunities available in Berlin as a city of music, it creates a network of people, places and resources to be used by the students. And this can be taken as a clear indication of Steven Sloane’s handwriting. After all, he has gained much esteem as a "conductor" not only on the podium, but also in this extended sense. At the moment, his role in the creation of a new concert hall in Bochum is raising the German media’s attention in particular. As the city of Munich is facing a controversial and seemingly desperate debate about the necessity of a new concert hall, the Bochum concert hall seems like a benchmark: it shows that even in an economically desolate city it is possible to build a cultural centre that will both serve the Bochumer Symphoniker as an adequate home and host the city’s music school, thus becoming a place for education and dialogue. Not only as the orchestra’s chief conductor – now in his 20th season – and networker for the new concert hall, but also as a member of the artistic board of the European Capital of Culture RUHR 2010 and for countless small and large projects in the Ruhr region, Steven Sloane has brought together people, institutions and ideas.

But back to the ICAB: Harry Curtis explains how cooperation and networking are achieved at the Academy. First of all, the university itself offers great possibilities. Sound engineers, composers, Early Music specialists, singers – they all study or respectively teach just down the hallway and are available for project-based collaborations as well as individual meetings on the young conductors’ specific questions. Pablo Rus Broseta found the collaboration with the opera department especially valuable, including fully staged opera rehearsals with singers and orchestra. "I have not worked in this area so much, that’s why it is so important to me,” he says. “And Steven Sloane is a great teacher for opera. From him I am learning a lot about how drama evolves, how everything is connected to the text. His special technique was new to me – he really created his own conducting vocabulary for the opera repertoire."

In order to be able to respond to the learning needs of the participants, who bring along not only an individual professional experience but also manage their concert agendas parallel to their studies, the organisational setup of the Advanced Professional Training for Conductors is a special one: as a postgraduate training programme of the University of the Arts’ Career College, it offers more freedom than other programmes that have to undergo the German university system’s complicated formal recognition procedures. Candidates do not necessarily have to speak German, nor do they need a formal university degree in conducting as long as they can prove their technical and artistic maturity. There is also no curriculum, as Harry Curtis explains. "When Pablo, for example, has a concert or if he wants to do more opera, then we can respond to that. These are things that can be customised, also because of the very small number of students."

With this setup, it is possible to attract the kind of applicants that Steven Sloane and Harry Curtis have in mind for their Academy. "You cannot post a beginner in front of a professional orchestra. And because we are constantly working with orchestras, we wanted to have very advanced students who can really benefit from this," says Harry Curtis as he explains how the work with orchestras is designed. "We offer three types of orchestral experience: The student-staffed studio orchestra which we use for projects within the university. There are also professional orchestras which are engaged by us for our master classes and concerts, for example the Brandenburger Symphoniker, the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, the Bochumer Symphoniker – German orchestras from A to Z which we visit or which visit us. And then there is this rather unusual thing, the cooperation with institutions such as opera houses and orchestras in Berlin and other German cities. As our partners, they have a genuine interest in the training of conductors at this level. We have developed a partnership with the Deutsche Oper; we will soon rehearse Shostakovich's Fifth with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; the Komische Oper is also part of it."

In addition to the university and the cultural institutions, there is a third partner, a teacher, so to speak, which is always available to the students: the cultural metropolis of Berlin. "Berlin is really a leading city, a great city to study in," says Harry Curtis. "It's a shame when there are no attractive courses in such a city, and you have to study in a small town instead where there is nothing to watch at night. All great conductors come here, you can visit rehearsals in the Philharmonic Hall and benefit from it. There are a lot of opportunities for ambitious young conductors." Pablo Rus Broseta confirms that the city itself was crucial for his decision to apply. "I've always wanted to live in Berlin for a while. The city is full of culture. I've lived in some great cultural spots in Europe, Amsterdam, Lyon and Paris, but hardly anywhere you can find more orchestras than here, and such an open atmosphere".

Harry Curtis believes that there is every chance the ICAB may develop within the next few years into one of the world's most important centres for the training of conductors. "We are at a time in which it is not entirely clear where you should study as a conductor and whether the schools which had a great reputation in the past are still so good. Thus, we have a special opportunity to develop something new for the training of conductors right now. It is certainly courageous of the University of the Arts to take this slightly different route. But I think with time, the ICAB will awaken forces. Agencies, theatres, orchestras will be able to follow who is currently studying here and will get interested in our graduates.”

Meanwhile, Pablo Rus Broseta’s prospects are already good: strengthened by the feedback of a whole year and more experienced than ever, he will set off to new shores: as Assistant Conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

The application deadline of ICAB for the academic year 2015/16 runs until 3/14/2015; Entrance examinations will be held on 20 and 21 April.

Further information: www.udk-berlin.de

Nina Rohlfs, 03/2015

Is Munich in (no) need of a new concert hall?

At a press conference on 2 February, the Minister-President of Bavaria Horst Seehofer and the Mayor of Munich Dieter Reiter announced that – instead of building a brand new concert hall for Munich, as originally foreseen – they were aiming to renovate the Philharmonic Hall at the Gasteig, and the Herkulessaal; subsequently, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) and Munich Philharmonic Orchestra (MPhil) were supposed to share both spaces. Bavarian Radio asked karsten witt musik management to produce a report at short notice, detailing the consequences of this decision.

The study was published by Bavarian Radio on 26 February under the title “Braucht München (k)einen neuen Konzertsaal” (Is Munich in (no) need of a new concert hall?). You can download the report in German here . Karsten Witt hopes that the study will help to bring the discussion in Munich back to a factual level. At the end of the 19-page paper, it comes to the following conclusions:

For at least one decade, a new first class concert hall for symphonic music has been demanded in Munich. In his government statement released well over a year ago, the Bavarian Minister-President recognised its necessity and promised its realisation: “We should facilitate new concert halls in Munich and Nuremberg for our world-famous orchestras.” There is nothing to suggest a revision of this intention.

The main arguments for such an additional concert hall are:

• If the BRSO and MPhil were to share the Gasteig, there would be no concert space for other promoters during the 24 weeks of each season when both orchestras work in Munich. These other promoters currently organise by far more concerts than the MPhil and BRSO together and thereby contribute significantly to the Gasteig’s earnings.
• The Philharmonic Hall at the Gasteig, opened in 1985, is a very good and highly successful multifunctional space with an unusually large audience capacity of around 2,400 seats. A hall of this size is, from an acoustic point of view, always problematic. The conversion of such a hall into an internationally first-class concert hall for symphonic music would be costly and risky. If it were indeed to succeed, a new multifunctional concert hall with considerably more than 2,000 seats would need to be built in Munich elsewhere. The Philharmonic Hall has proven that Munich needs such a hall.
• The Herkulessaal, Munich’s post-war provisional hall, is unsuitable for large orchestras due to its size. This – not the acoustic weaknesses of the Gasteig – is the main reason why a new large concert hall for classical music is required in Munich.
• Moreover, the Herkulessaal cannot come into consideration as a replacement venue for the Gasteig during an eventual period of closure. If both orchestras were to try to serve their audiences in this hall with its 1,270 seats, the concert dates, which are at present available in the Herkulessaal throughout the entire season, would not suffice. The orchestras would also not be able to rehearse sufficiently and there would be absolutely no room for the remaining 250 concerts that are currently taking place fifty-fifty in the Herkulessaal and the Gasteig.
• If the Gasteig has to be refurbished, it must first be thoroughly investigated whether the refurbishment of the Philharmonic Hall can be carried out during several longer holiday periods. If a closure of more than one year were is necessary, a replacement venue would have to be built. Considering the costs of such a project, it would be more sensible to invest the necessary funds into a new concert hall.

The study contains the following recommendations:

• Since the new hall will serve future generations of composers, musicians, promoters and concertgoers, future forms of presentation and communication, as well as future technologies and media must be taken into consideration. Intensive conceptual work is required in order to develop a vision for such a concert hall, which is supposed to accommodate performances throughout the entire space as well as live electronics, screenings, multimedia projects, perhaps even dance. The development of the vision for the new hall must be started straight away and must certainly not be left to future architects, as is unfortunately sometimes the case in Germany.
• Alongside successful auditoriums, the particular architectural and organisational requirements of pioneering international concert halls (such as the The Sage Gateshead) should be taken into account. It is not just a question of achieving the best possible acoustics, but also connecting music with other art forms, integrating new forms of communication, new media, audience participation and much more.
• The proponents of the concert hall project should start a fundraising campaign soon to make it plausible that a substantial engagement exists behind the project and that a considerable part of the costs will be borne by private partners. Each party must clarify which contribution they can make.
• The difficulty discussed here also exists in other cultural metropolis. In order to incorporate experience from elsewhere and generally broaden the debate, it would seem sensible to appoint an international advisory committee that would support the project for a new concert hall throughout the process.

Further information (in German): www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de

Karsten Witt, 02/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Alertness, Trust, Humility: Jonathan Stockhammer in profile

An American conductor who lives in Germany, leading a radio orchestra that belongs to a station once founded by American occupation authorities, with a programme that includes works by Ives, Barber and Bernstein: it cannot get much more transatlantic than this in mid-February when Jonathan Stockhammer will conduct the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and Gächinger Kantorei. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, a longstanding editor of the Frankfurter Rundschau and prominent author of books on topics such as opera and New Music, met the conductor to talk about a lifestyle based on dialogue, about exemplary conductors – and last but not least, about the music scene on both sides of the Atlantic.

When Jonathan Stockhammer meets me at a rather noisy café in the centre of Frankfurt, the grey winter’s day becomes noticeably lighter. He had an early start, flying in from Berlin this morning. He does a lot of travelling. But he does not give the impression of being over-busy or rushed. He has taken plenty of time for our meeting. Two and a half hours go by in a flash and at the end it is not he who has to leave for another meeting, but me. Jonathan is able to convey something of an inner peace, a profound serenity with great animation and tireless eloquence. Someone whose only aim is to pursue the next methodical step of his career strategy would certainly not look like this.

The slim, wiry man in his mid-forties enjoys talking but he can also listen. His artistic enthusiasm has something inviting, convincing and thoroughly surprising about it. And yet he gives the person opposite time to speak, waits for their reaction, which gives the other person’s own enthusiasm further impetus and substance. One gets the sense that, in relation to conductors, the term “charisma” will have to be newly defined. For Jonathan, “charisma” does not arise so much from the aloof authority of an iron will but from the flexibility and alertness of a lifestyle based on dialogue, which gains its own security and legitimacy from communication with others. That may be typical of a new generation of conductors that relies on collegiality rather than old-fashioned authoritarian structures. Jonathan’s artistic-humanist ethos seems to go further, however. It combines with terms such as trust, alertness, humility and vulnerability, and views working on an interpretation as a process similar to giving birth; it is “allowed to happen” and actively created in equal measures, a Taoist intention to an extent.

The Far East is also certainly nearer to the American way of thinking than to Europeans who are more focused on themselves. Jonathan Stockhammer was born in Hollywood. Of course, films become a special part of life there. Jonathan’s father was a violinist at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He was therefore exposed to great conductors from an early age, including the likes of Zubin Mehta, Carlo Maria Giulini, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Georg Solti (who was often invited as a guest conductor with his Chicago Symphony Orchestra). Esa-Pekka Salonen and Peter Eötvös in particular left lasting impressions on Jonathan; he was assistant to both conductors who are also well-known as composers of contemporary music.

Jonathan has now lived in Berlin for eleven years and does not conceal the fact that in his opinion, the Central European music scene seems to be better developed than others. His relationship to German music was always very intense. Jonathan, who grew up in a Jewish liberal household, started dealing with specifically Christian subject matter relatively late. Regarding Wolfgang Rihm’s Deus passus, which he will conduct in Strasbourg, this opened up a new spiritual world, which he responds to with increasing respect.

Being part of the circles around Peter Eötvös, it seemed natural that Jonathan Stockhammer had a lot to do with New Music and would be associated with it. He is a regular guest with unusual initiatives at advanced collectives such as Ensemble Modern and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. Jonathan does not strive for great positions in opera houses and concert halls at all costs. He is also interested in the organisational side of things and so for him it is more important to be able to realise programme ideas effectively, preferably in ongoing collaboration with leading institutions. The disruptive nature of constantly travelling would not be able to satisfy him in the long run.

He is also not especially fixated on a particular aspect of the music industry. For all his tendencies towards modern and experimental music, he does not want to neglect the universality of the “whole” music (to which for him as an American, the pop music tradition also belongs, even if he does not place value on its commercial attraction). The breadth of his artistic orientation includes Michael Gielen’s strict renditions of Mahler and Beethoven, as well as a recollection of listening to a recording of “Swan Lake” as a child, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, which he listened to once again much later in order to verify it. Its magical purple cover: a radiantly unforgettable early memory. This is how diversely rooted an intellectually electrifying, synaesthetically permeated artist’s life can be.

February 2014, Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Published with kind permission of the author

Sarah Wegener: I just have to SING!

It is Sarah Wegener’s third encounter with Jörg Widmann’s Drittes Labyrinth: on 21 February the soprano will perform the solo part in the roughly 50-minute-long piece for voice and large orchestra at Casa da Música with the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto under Peter Rundel. The world premiere at the Kölner Philharmonie was a turbulent one for her; the music came at the very last minute. “It was extremely nerve-wracking because the piece is unbelievably difficult,” she remembers during our discussion.

“We had so little time that Jörg Widmann rang me and we spent three hours going through the score together. We literally practised over the phone.” Laughing, she reconstructs the situation: “I went diii daaa then he said, no no, a bit more diii diii.” The performance itself was a roaring success, even if it did involve palpitations. “On top of that, it was broadcast live on the radio! Everything worked out fine in the end because luckily I’m a quick learner and have nerves of steel. And the second performance in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam with the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest under Emilio Pomàrico was a lot more relaxed.”

In the run-up to the performance in Porto, she is pleased that not only the piece has become an old acquaintance. Working with Peter Rundel will also be a reunion. “I know him from the world premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’s revised version of the opera Bluthaus at the Wiener Festwochen,” she says and tells of other partners with whom she enjoys working with and on a regular basis. The composer Georg Friedrich Haas is among them, so too is the oboist and composer Heinz Holliger, as well as conductors such as Emilio Pomárico, Michael Hofstetter and Frieder Bernius with whom she has performed many gems of the orchestral and oratorio repertoire in and around Stuttgart. “What unites us is that we are always thinking about the end result: the music takes centre stage. Many people who I am able to work well with are modest and I would also say that about myself. I don’t like rivalry at all.”

Since that world premiere, another member of her musical circle is Jörg Widmann. Their first meeting happened by chance at Stuttgart train station. The singer was picking up Georg Friedrich Haas from there to go through an operatic role together. “And he met Jörg Widmann on the platform by coincidence.” He was delighted to meet the singer who he had heard so much about and who he already had in mind for his Labyrinth.

Jörg Widmann also wanted to get Sarah Wegener on board as soloist in his work Dunkle Saiten. “At first I really didn’t want to do it because it’s far too high, downright risky,” explains the singer. “But the problem was that Jörg then said he would re-write it for me; he would do anything for me to sing it.” And laughing heartily, she adds: “Now I can’t get out of it.” The work, which received its world premiere in 2000 and is described by the composer himself as an “excess”, will take Sarah Wegener to three concerts in March with the NDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Thomas Hengelbrock.

The fact that Sarah Wegener’s concert calendar includes performances of contemporary works that present physical challenges as well as plenty of classical and romantic repertoire is a blessing to the singer. The beginning of 2015 features performances of Dvořak’s Stabat Mater with the Collegium Vocale Gent and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysees under Philippe Herreweghe and Beethoven’s Mass in C major, Op. 86 with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Hans-Christoph Rademann. “Traditional repertoire forms the bulk of my work after all. Oratorio, lied, chamber music. And I have to say, thank goodness for this foundation,” she says.

That said, New Music also continues to give her stimuli for the classical repertoire. “When I sing a new opera such as Bluthaus, for example, followed by a programme with Bach, it’s so inspiring, a real experience,” she says. “New Music opens one’s ear in another way, for example it makes one listen more deeply. When you sing a Schumann lied afterwards, it certainly sounds different, more expanded. Moreover, with New Music one is constantly thinking: Oh, I won’t be able to manage that, I can’t do that – you come up against barriers, practise and manage it in the end. In this instance a leopard can change its spots; you gain a freedom that can also be used in traditional music.”

However, she does not choose to sing every new work that is offered to her randomly. “The music has to be sensual in some way,” she says and with a laugh adds, “Georg’s music is of course pure sensuality.” Georg Friedrich Haas has entrusted substantial works to the singer for some years now, including ATTHIS for soprano and 8 instruments and the cycle …wie stille brannte das Licht, as well as main roles in his operas. The composer met Sarah Wegener in 2008 when she was covering the main role in the world premiere of his opera Melancholia. The composer walked into the room just as she stepped in as substitute during a rehearsal. “That was the start of a long musical friendship,” she says. A friendship that will lead her to two large opera houses in 2015 and 2016: the world premiere of a new opera with a libretto by Jon Fosse will take place in the autumn at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, with the German premiere following in 2016 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Sarah Wegener will also sing one of the main roles at the Schwetzinger SWR Festspiele in Koma, the third and final part of Georg Friedrich Haas’ opera trilogy based on texts by Händl Klaus. The opera follows Bluthaus (2011) and Thomas (2013).

“It may sound silly, but it just seems to happen to me,” explains the soprano regarding these prospects. “I try not to force anything; these large engagements come to me of their own accord.” The common denominators of allowing things to come to her, following an impulse with great enthusiasm, and being inspired by encounters are perhaps characteristic of Sarah Wegener’s entire musical career. Her initial love of music was sparked intuitively and unencumbered by family input (“My parents are both musical, they just don’t know it”) in the headmaster’s office of the local music school. With curiosity, the young Sarah Wegener marvelled at an enormous instrument. Would she like to hear how it sounds, asked the headmaster. “And then he leaned this double bass again me and played the low E string. Everything vibrated and that’s when I fell in love.”

Today the double bass no longer plays a large role in Sarah Wegener’s life: “Only for grounding and pitching. But apart from that, I’m out of practice.” However, she does still profit from her orchestral past and her degree in school music with double bass as her main subject. “I have a great foundation thanks to playing the double bass. It has trained my ear immensely, as did my eleven years leading a church choir. I hear from the bottom up through the whole orchestra,” she explains. She therefore also feels completely contented when standing as the soloist in the middle of the orchestra, as was the case recently in her celebrated performances of Strauss’ Vier letzte Lieder. “That’s my cup of tea, really great,” she gushes. “On the opera stage you’re further away from the orchestra. In orchestral lieder, I feel at home being right at the centre of the action.”

With so much enthusiasm for orchestras, one might ask why Sarah Wegener switched to being a singer. “I don’t know how to explain that either,” she says but tries to anyway. “In 2002 towards the end of my studies, something happened to me that forced me to stop completely. I couldn’t do anything; I was exhausted and stayed at home for about nine months. During this time, something from deep within me came to the surface, it wanted to get out, and suddenly I sang. Before that moment, I had almost never done that! I simply realised: of course, I just have to SING! In effect, I was walking along a path without looking to the left or right, and then I was forced to stand still. I was able to look around me and I noticed, yes hang on a moment, I’m going in THAT direction.”

Looking back, Sarah Wegener is amazed at how consistently the stations along this path have emerged, how she now wanders along it with her high-profile musical partners visiting the major European opera houses and concert halls and performing almost every kind of repertoire, from her own lieder recital ideas to large new orchestral works. One gets a sense that she feels comfortable with this success. She’s clearly not addicted to it – at the most to making music itself. And she doesn’t always need the big stage for this obsession; sometimes a few friends in her living room are enough. “I’ve revived the tradition of salon music at my home,” she says and describes the strict rules of her house concerts: “Those who practise have to leave. Perfectionism upsets the flow. We therefore try to make music outside people’s subject areas wherever possible, so my guests don’t play their main instrument. It’s just supposed to be a bit of fun.”

Nina Rohlfs 01/2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Philosophy and Emotion: The conductor Titus Engel

Interview with Meret Forster

Mr. Engel, what made you want to become a conductor?

It was a philosophically motivated and emotional decision. When I was exploring career options, it became clear to me that I wanted to invest my energy in the arts world. I would also have liked to become a film director, I still love the cinema, but a foray into this area showed me that my creative vision was not large enough. Music is the art form in which my talents lie.

At the time, I played the double bass in all sorts of formations, in youth orchestras, various jazz bands, as a continuo player in baroque projects. Then the opportunity arose to try out conducting with the youth orchestra; I started a project with music by Olivier Messiaen and it immedialtely enthralled me on an emotional level. That’s when I knew that I wanted to become a conductor.

But you studied musicology and philosophy before conducting.

Yes, I wanted to build a firm foundation for my cultural education. I first studied in Zurich and then in Berlin. Five years after the Berlin Wall came down, there was an incredibly stimulating atmosphere in the city. Musically speaking, there was something going on every evening. Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Christian Thielemann, Kent Nagano and Vassily Petrenko were active in the city at the time. And my fellow-students were really great, many of them now hold important positions in the German and international music scene. I founded a tutorial for contemporary music together with Viktor Schoner, to which we invited many renowned composers. And after we met Gerard Mortier, we initiated the “Akademie Musiktheater Heute” (Academy of Music Theatre Today), which is now run by the Deutsche Bank Stiftung.

Why did you study conducting in Dresden?

In Christian Kluttig I met a wonderful teacher who conveyed the classical conductor’s craft to me. And I knew that in Dresden, in keeping with great east German tradition, I would have the opportunity to gain practical experience with professional orchestras. That is the most important thing during a conductor’s training. Dresden proved itself to be my lucky break. By my second year, I was already conducting an opera; the world premiere of Benjamin Schweitzer’s Jakob von Gunten. After that I was made Musical Director of the ensemble courage with whom I learnt a great deal over the course of ten years.

However you were not fixed on Dresden?

It was clear to me that I wanted to spread my wings. I got the chance to assist many fascinating conductors, including Sylvain Cambreling, Marc Albrecht, Peter Rundel and Lothar Zagrosek. During my studies I experienced the atmosphere at the Salzburg Festival, Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Opéra de Paris. Alongside this, I gained first-hand experience as Musical Director of the ensemble resonanz in Hamburg, taking on advanced productions of Weber’s Freischütz, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Monteverdi’s Orfeo.

You now conduct at renowned opera houses including the Teatro Real Madrid and the Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart Operas, and lead long-standing ensembles such as the WDR and SWR Symphony Orchestras. You are also a regular guest at the festivals in Salzburg and Lucerne. How did this all come to be?

I would call it a happy and organic process of growth. New projects and opportunities always came out of my engagements and assistantships, my area of activity was always growing. I got really lucky when Gerard Mortier brought me to the Teatro Real Madrid where I have conducted several world premieres (including Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain, the last from Mortier’s time), as well as classical concerts. I have a very trusting relationship with the orchestra.

What is it about contemporary music that fascinates you?

It is music of our time, an expression of our current culture and society. And collaborating with living composers is a terrific aspect of my work. I always learn something new, new sounds, new conceptual approaches to works. And I am also reminded of the boundaries of notation. That allows me to deal with earlier music more freely.

In the last few years you have conducted a very wide repertoire, from Monteverdi, Offenbach and Wagner, right up to contemporary music. Does that not contain a certain risk of arbitrariness?

No, I don’t think so. On the contrary, I think that the interpretations of these works spur each other on. When I phrase a melody in a contemporary piece, I can hear the possibilities of Baroque music. When I conduct Wagner, I try to bring out what his music is leading to. And my jazz experience also continues to help me to find the groove in a work. I love combining early and new music in my programmes. Contemporary music should wherever possible be performed in combination with classical music rather than in isolation – that way it can fully develop.

You also go beyond the norm and programme concerts with Islamic contemporary music, and work with poetry slammers, rappers and beat boxers.

My collaboration with composers from the Islamic world brings me a lot of joy, it is wonderful music and a small contribution to a mutual understanding between cultures. The classical music world must not isolate itself but open itself up to all areas of society. That’s why it is of great concern to me to bring different musical and artistic worlds together.

What is your approach to interpreting early music?

On the one hand I always deal intensively with historical performance practice. How would a work have been conducted when it was first performed? What do we know about the traditions of the time that isn’t noted in the score? But as opposed to those who advocate historical performance practice, I don’t stick solely to this approach. One mustn’t forget that we cannot reconstruct the audiences of a certain era, which is what would be necessary for a really authentic performance. I therefore also deal with the question of what this music means to me today and for our society, and then try to incorporate both sides in my interpretation.

How do you see your role as conductor in relation to an orchestra, a choir and soloists?

I love making music together. I go to rehearsals with a clear concept of my interpretation but I am also open to spontaneity and suggestions from my fellow musicians. I have great esteem for their individual skills and do not see myself as the dominating force but rather as a primus inter pares. When I first started conducting, I worked with democratic ensembles and that shaped me. When conducting an orchestra you have to lead firmly, but open-minded listening is the most important thing.

What does working with stage directors mean to you?

Just as I love working with composers, so too do I love working with directors. The atmosphere at an opera production is marvellous. Ideally with a long preparation period, you try to find a coherent interpretation together. It is a productive examination of the material and of oneself. I learnt that from Gerard Mortier and Sylvain Cambreling. With both of them it was clear that music and stage have to combine to make a relevant dramatisation. If you only get involved during the orchestra rehearsals on-stage, you won’t understand the directional concept. There I have to reproach many of my colleagues.

What importance does philosophy have for your conducting?

There are two vital influences. I always find it important to contextualise musical works. In other words, music doesn’t stand in isolation, it has a connection and a relevance to us people. We as creative artists are responsible for standing up for progressive values and campaigning for peace and tolerance. The second vital influence that philosophy has on my work is the habit of critically questioning tradition. I always start with the score and not with “famous” recordings. And I try to bring to scores what I learnt during my studies from rereading and reflecting on philosophical texts, namely a deeper probing of texts. There’s a nice quote by Nadja Boulanger: “One should never hestitate to analyse music because the more one analyses it, the more one delves into its mystery.”

But there is also a very funny aspect where music goes beyond philosophy and that is emotions. In our economically streamlined world there is unfortunately often not enough time to act on one’s feelings. In music you can act on them. That personally brings me a lot of enjoyment and fulfilment – and to my listeners too, I hope.

January 2015 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Breathless Through the Night: Tora Augestad at the Volksbühne Berlin

The singer and actress Tora Augestad can be seen this season at the Volksbühne Berlin in Christoph Marthaler’s tongue in cheek production Tessa Blomstedt gibt nicht auf (Tessa Blomstedt won’t give up). She has already impressed premiere audiences in the role of Kekke:

Whether Tora Augestad is singing John Dowland’s breathtaking “Come again” or Elfi Graf’s sentimental “Am schönsten ist es zu Hause” – you could listen spellbound until the end of time. Neue Züricher Zeitung

It is possible that no performer will ever parody Whitney Houston with such shivering movements as the strong-voiced Tora Augestad (…). Der Tagesspiegel

Tora Augestad delivers the gorgeous final song in an incredible black velvet trouser suit from the 1970s with the full version of Elfi Graf’s tear-jerker “Am schönsten ist es zu Hause”. Die Welt

Once again she can show the full extent of her versatility as both a singer and an actress: the musical offering features arias by Henry Purcell and John Dowland, as well as hits by Abba, Udo Jürgens, Whitney Houston and Matthias Reim, among others.

Tessa Blomstedt’s search for that happily-ever-after and the challenges that go along with it in the age of digital dating can be seen again at the Volksbühne Berlin on 30 November 2014, 18:00 and on 7 and 26 December 2014, 18:00. Further performances in 2015 are already planned; you can watch a taster of the production here:

This is Tora Augestad’s seventh production with director Christoph Marthaler. In the 2014/15 season she can also be seen in his staged liederabend King Size, which will be performed on international stages including in Girona (November), Geneva (March), Douai/Arras (April), Prato (April), Rotterdam (May), Turin (June), at the Bergen International Festival (June), and at London’s Royal Opera House/Linbury Studio Theatre (April).

Mindful of the small things – Friedrich Cerha as a visual artist

Musicians who also express themselves in other artistic fields are at the centre of this year’s Donaueschingen Festival. A composer who many will see in a new light on this occasion is Friedrich Cerha. With over 900 paintings and collages as well as sculptural works produced over the many decades of his musical career, the composer leads a veritable double life. In Donaueschingen both sides of the artist Friedrich Cerha are on display.

During the opening concert on 17 October, his new orchestral piece Nacht (“Night”) will receive its world premiere by the SWR Symphony Orchestra under Emilio Pomàrico. In addition, his visual art is featured in an exhibition alongside that of several other composers, and this will be only the fourth time that it is presented to the public. In the following text, written for the third of these exhibitions which was held in the Bavarian town of Waidhofen in 2012, the composer describes his art.

Even as a child I was drawn to the little things that surround us, and I collected all that I found beautiful and appealing: stones, roots, old wood, pieces of metal, seeds, tree barks, coins – and I lived among them. Nowadays, people are not as mindful of their surroundings. Many things are used without further regard, and carelessly discarded afterwards.

Very early on, I tried to incorporate these objects into my visual works, even before I had ever heard anything about object art. I have been a visual artist for virtually my entire life, except between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two. The reason was not the war but my art teacher at school who decided I lacked talent after I failed to capture a rock formation in true perspective. That affected me so deeply that I fell “silent”.

After the war (during which I deserted twice as a soldier) I began to paint in watercolours. In the 1950s I had close ties with the Art Club where I played contemporary music as a violinist with Hans Kann. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Hans Fruhmann and Karl Prantl which had a big influence on me.

1958 was an important year for me. I was chosen to represent the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) at the Expo in Brussels and had the chance to see the works by painters of other nationalities. I immersed myself in the French art of the 1940s and 1950s and learned about African painting and sculpting traditions. I was fascinated by the montages of Kurt Schwitters – I felt very close to him – and I admired the works of Bracusi, Pevsner and Naum Gabo. In 1963, I began to paint on wood and integrate metal, stones and objects that I found into my paintings, and in the 1970s I started to work in stone, too.

There are some points of contact between my visual art and my music. Back when I was working on act three of Berg’s Lulu there was a painting, Jack the Ripper, and two paintings from the time of my opera Baal, Baal’s Women and Baal. At one time, my visual art also inspired me musically, with the ensemble piece Catalogue des objets trouvées.

During the almost 50 years of my creative life, ideas have been developed, transformed, resumed and re-created, as one would expect. The selection for the current exhibition focuses on geometric arrangements which recur in different ways through different periods. Beside these rigid arrangements, many of my paintings also betray a remnant of imprecision that I welcome and that matters to me because it bears witness to the creative act and natural human imperfection.

Throughout my long life, I never had careerist ambitions with my art. Creative work has always been an end in itself. I have to work, just as I have to breathe. Music must be performed in order to be perceived, and these performances brought about something of an international career in my case. My visual art has been publicly shown on only two occasions so far, once in Salzburg and once in Graz, and both times without my initiative. But I appreciate the opportunity to make it accessible to those who are interested.

'These really are new sounds' – Hans Zender in Donaueschingen

Above the vineyards by Lake Constance, with stunning views of the ‘Swabian Sea’, lies the Glazier House, summer home of Gertrud and Hans Zender. It is here that we meet to talk about the composer’s new work, which is to be premiered just a stone’s throw away from here. On 17 October Oh cristalina... will form part of the opening concert of the Donaueschingen Festival, with the SWR Symphony Orchestra and SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart. It is with happy anticipation that Hans Zender is looking forward to the event: "Since I stopped conducting, I now enjoy just sitting down and listening," he says, especially as he knows that the world premiere is in the hands of conductor Emilio Pomárico, "one of my favorites, really."

"I tend to steer towards choral and vocal music and for me, the highlight of composing is when I can use both singers and orchestra," Hans Zender explains. One look at his catalogue of works confirms this – his Cantos, a series of pieces for voices and instruments which he worked on throughout his entire career, is extensive. However, Oh cristalina… is part of a different cycle; the composer did not want it to be included in the Cantos. "These are four short pieces between ten and 25 minutes in length, which can be performed independently – or now, as a whole.” The first of these pieces, Adónde? Where? which is based on the Cántico espiritual by the Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz, was premiered five years ago in Berlin by the Klangforum Wien. It was followed by Oh bosques! / O forests! (premiered in 2010 by the Bavarian Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra) and Por qué? / Why? (March 2014, SWR Vokalensemble). "The new piece contains texts from the beginning of the Cántico espiritual that I had not used before because for the other pieces, I had randomly picked out verses that I liked. The first 13 or 14 stanzas are now complete, albeit in the wrong order, and the whole work becomes a cycle, which was not planned from the start," says the composer.

However, it is not too surprising that he could not get Saint John of the Cross out of his head so quickly. "For me he is one of the great poets of world literature, and I have adored him from a young age, but for a long time I dared not touch him." The priest’s Cántico espiritual from 1578 – probably his most well-known text – is a free paraphrase of the Song of Songs. For Hans Zender, this is familiar territory as he used the entire Song of Songs in Hebrew and German for his Canto VIII. "This is now the utmost perfection in poetry that I know of," he says about San Juan de la Cruz's work. "As a composer I let myself be led, although not par for par, by the rhythm and the sound of the poem. In this case, it is not only the characteristic sound of the Spanish language, but also a very interesting metric structure that alternates between seven and eleven syllables per line. And this oscillation between seven and eleven interested me rhythmically, as it results in a very strange feeling of being in limbo." Musically, Hans Zender did not use historical or geographical localisations of the text – the 16th century and the rich Iberian musical tradition are not his subject matter. "However, subliminally there is a certain chromaticism at work or more precisely, the microtonality attempts to carry forward the vowels of San Juan de la Cruz with their incredible colours. And that is really where I start musically: to present microtonality, which I have dealt with a lot in my work since the 1990s, in a very dense network once again."

Unlike many spectralist composers who rely on a fundamental tone in order to make overtones tangible, taking into account harmonic constraints, and also in contrast to Luigi Nono, who exposed smaller and smaller intervals using microtonal differentiation, Hans Zender took his own path into microtonality. "Of course, all these routes come close to each other because you become obsessed with the new sounds. Because these really are new sounds!" explains the composer. "However, compared with Nono, I do the contrary: I try to purify the intervals that are, due to the tempered tuning, “dirty” in our sound system by working with twelfth tones. Thus, I have 72 tones per octave, six times twelve. If I, for example, detract a twelfth tone from a major third, I get a pure interval, just like when I detract a sixth tone from a minor seventh. And if I take a tritone and detract a quarter tone, or three twelfths, then I get a pure tritone."

"This technique makes these strong intervals seem purified," he continues. "For me, it has something to do with air pollution and marine pollution. If you remove the toxins in different quantums, you can attain pure water again. This was one of my main objectives in my handling of harmony over the last 25 years." For Hans Zender, the attention to pure intervals practised by specialists of Early Music has always been exemplary. "I wanted to have the same thing in New Music, but with much more complex harmonies," he says. Under no circumstances would he sacrifice the achievements of atonality for a pure sound – and he dedicated the first part of the cycle to Arnold Schoenberg. On first glance, this dedication may even seem paradoxical, as Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositions require the perfect temperament of the halftone scale. However, in his theory of harmony dating from 1911, the composer had predicted, in a prophetic way, a new engagement with the worlds of overtones and had called the tempered system "a ceasefire of indefinite length."

As this ceasefire was observed over centuries on most parts, Hans Zender's works place the listener into new sound situations. "My music demands the listener to pay very close attention in order to then rediscover harmony. That's the dream," says the composer. The harmony is supposed to be crystal clear. "That is why I liked the title Oh cristalina... so much. It occurs in the text and refers to the sound that I have in mind as an ideal – not only in this piece, but especially here. Because the sound is a reflection of what San Juan de la Cruz is looking for in poetry. It is hard to describe, and I am not a linguist – but I have the feeling that in his writing, he reaches an extraordinary pureness. He does not describe the spiritual world as a projection or as a construct or as a subjective sensation, but he describes it as a reality. We are not used to this today; in modern literature, we find the terms and images deconstructed or extinguished, in a kind of negative dialectic. But there is also the possibility to do the opposite. And this is actually my way, to put everything together again, only in a much more nuanced and subtle way – harmonically, formally, in every respect."

For Hans Zender, the quest for integrity is at the heart of the Cántico espiritual: "It is about the interaction between the physical, represented here by the bride, and the spiritual, the groom. Due to the contact becoming ever closer, eventually leading to fusion, the bride in this poetic image is freed and flies up as a dove. At this moment the groom says to her: You must not fly away. ‘Vuélvete paloma', turn back! In order for us to meet each other, you have to stay on the ground and do all the hard work.” And with a wink he adds: "You cannot just fly away and operate solely from your emotion, but you have to build everything yourself, brick by brick – and then it flies."

The new piece can of course only take off after an intense rehearsal process in which the singers and the instrumentalists must first learn how to deal with the modified intervals. This might be difficult, but it is manageable especially due to the fact that the "purified" third, seventh and tritone intervals always sound together with their root. "That means that the performers can check with their own ear: am I in tune? And they actually learn it in a short space of time," says the composer. Another helping factor is that Hans Zender's musical language is anything but alien to the musicians of the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra and SWR Vokalensemble. Hans Zender has had a close connection with the SWR Symphony Orchestra for a long time and not only as a conductor; the orchestra has also performed many of his works. "And the Vokalensemble has just premiered the penultimate piece of the cycle this year, again incredibly well! I feel really blessed with these two ensembles. It is all the worse, of course, that one of them is to be closed down," he regrets. "There are not many orchestras like the SWR Symphony Orchestra, where the musicians are so passionate about New Music that they invest so much. They explore new pieces in their spare time, they play chamber music by composers whose works they perform in Donaueschingen, they even award a prize to the orchestral piece which they consider to be the best. This is really a paradise, not to be found anywhere else in the world."

17/10/2014, 20:00
Baarsporthalle Donaueschingen

Nina Rohlfs 10/2014

Beauty is a weapon: The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan

It is always a sensation for the dance world when the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan brings one of their productions to Germany. The great dance critic Jochen Schmidt described the company’s performance of the trilogy Cursive in the Berliner Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2006 as, "Currently the most relevant dance piece in the world," and Pina Bausch warmly welcomed the ensemble in 2008 to her NRW International Dance Festival with great enthusiasm. The productions that have been performed in Germany over the last two decades are without exception electrifying and have received high praise from audiences and critics alike.

It is also a special occasion each time the choreographer, Lin Hwai-min, takes his dancers to the Taiwanese provinces to perform in villages, taking his art to the most remote corners of the country. One can hardly believe that one of the most famous people in Taiwan is a choreographer. However, the islanders’ love for "their" dance company cannot be disputed: up to 60,000 people attend the large open-air performances in Taipei; a street, a national holiday and even an asteroid have been named after the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.

Lin Hwai-min’s unique dance vocabulary has arisen from his inimitable mix of modern western dance, which he studied in New York under Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, with Asian themes and movement culture. Alongside ballet and modern dance, his dancers also practise meditation, qigong, calligraphy and far eastern martial arts in order to gain permeability of the body and variety of expression to their dancing. In order to understand how deeply this synthesis goes, it is worth having a look at the varied history of the company, which Lin founded following studies in the United States in 1973. The young man, who at that time still had absolutely no experience in choreography and little dancing experience, used his prominence as a writer (Lin became an overnight success in Taiwan at the age of 22 with his novel Cicada, which is still a bestseller), to bring the first modern dance company of the Chinese-speaking world into being. The success of the company meant that artistic gambles also became possible. The production Legacy, for example, which tells the story of the pioneering settlers of Taiwan, was a risk when it was performed under Chaing Kai-shek’s government – this was not popular in a state, which saw itself as the better China. However, on the day of the premiere, the political situation changed. Jimmy Carter broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the country lost its protecting power and suddenly the first play about the history of Taiwan was inadvertently performed as a founding piece of art supporting the state and a new national identity.

Perhaps this was only a brief incident as Lin Hwai-min does not see himself primarily as a political artist. He does, however, recognise the explosive power of aesthetics: "Beauty is a weapon; as I understand it, it is based above all on an incredible degree of freedom." The social involvement of his company also stands for its determination to touch and strengthen people. In this way, the many Cloud Gate schools across Taiwan are in no way "drill" academies, preoccupied with producing uniform dancers. Instead, they wish to arouse physical awareness in a playful way, allow dance as a basic ability in life to be experienced by everyone and promote freedom and responsibility. Cloud Gate 2, the youth, educational and outreach wing of the company, is thus not simply an elite training school for the main ensemble to pay homage to their master’s repertoire, as is so often the case in other companies. It offers a place for the ideas of younger choreographers to be showcased, and pursues a wide range of individual social projects.

Just as the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan has given a lot to its Taiwanese audience during its almost 40-year existence, so too did it need the support of its compatriots in 2008 following a devastating fire that destroyed the company’s rehearsal studio. In a catastrophic turn of events, costumes and the whole technical archive were lost. However, provisional arrangements meant that rehearsals for the production Whisper of Flowers could be resumed on the second day after the fire. It was performed half a year later and the company was able to build a new studio thanks to generous donations from Taiwanese companies and private individuals.

It was here, in a building once used by Radio Taiwan International, that the company’s latest production was developed. In China, Water Stains on the Wall is a popular metaphor that represents the highest state in the aesthetics of calligraphy. It stands for the organic and unpretentious qualities that result from processes of natural evolution. In an interview on his internationally renowned trilogy , Lin Hwai-min said in 2006, "Calligraphy and movement are closely linked to one another. Before you start to write, you warm yourself up: you make your body soft and supple. It’s important to watch your rhythm and your breathing. You can be a good writer only if you breathe properly. It’s exactly the same with dance. A good calligrapher is a dancer. He leaves his energy on blank rice paper, while dancers in space."

In Water Stains on the Wall, projections of dragging cloud formations appear in alternating shades like ink that is always developing new forms in a continuous flow. Through Toshio Hosokawa’s music, the dancers’ light skirts take off from the slanted stage into the room, just like the clouds. The Japanese composer has, for his part, a strong connection with calligraphy: "My music is calligraphy, drawn on the open border between time and space. Each individual sound is shaped like a line or a point, drawn by a brush," Hosokawa says, revealing his aesthetic kinship with Lin Hwai-min’s choreography. It is a work of abstract beauty that awaits audiences – and most certainly a one-off dance event.

Nina Rohlfs, 04/2012 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

'Music is a human endeavour' – Michael Jarrell

For Michael Jarrell, the world premiere of his new work at the Festival Musica in Strasbourg is a home game of sorts. Works of the Swiss composer have made the festival programme no fewer than 16 times over the last three decades, and every year since 2007. His new piece for the Arditti Quartet and Bamberg Symphony, however, was a special challenge. “For me, composing for a string quartet is like writing for an orchestra,” he explains. But then an idea came to him that kick-started the creative process and also provided the work with its title, Spuren (“Traces”). “The string quartet presents a musical idea and leaves behind traces, so to speak. The orchestra then functions as a screen onto which the string quartet’s musical ideas are projected and enlarged.”

It is not just the festival with which Michael Jarrell shares a long history but also the protagonists of the world premiere. “It’s easier when I know for whom I am writing,” he says. “After all, music is a human endeavour. As a composer, I work with the soloists and the conductor; the conductor, in turn, works with the orchestra; and the orchestra plays for the audience. That network is very important for me.” He has cooperated closely with Jonathan Nott, who will conduct the Bamberg Symphony in Strasbourg on 3 October, as well as Irvine Arditti. “I talked with Irvine while composing the first movement, for instance,” he recalls. “It uses only pizzicato throughout, and I had a question about the tempi. That is something you simply have to try out.”

However, Michael Jarrell is not looking for constant contact with the musicians. “I always think about the performers while I’m composing but there are certain advantages to the composer’s perspective, too. You see things differently than someone who has always practiced the same patterns for his whole life. As a composer, I respect the tradition of the instrument, but I also have the freedom to approach it in a more abstract and unprejudiced manner.” His approach to finding new but playable solutions is thoroughly hands-on. “I have a violin at home, for instance, and I go through everything myself – though not in real-time, of course. I’m not a violinist.” Time and again, his technical solutions baffle his soloists. “For instance, I wrote a violin concerto for Isabelle Faust, and in the first rehearsal she asked me: ‘Michael, how did you come up with that? That is the only way you can play this phrase.’ Well, it’s because I see things from the composer’s perspective, not from the one of the performer.”

To always keep an open mind is something Michael Jarrell learned early in life, when at the age of 5 he started taking piano lessons in Geneva. “My teacher encouraged us to invent something on the piano, and then she helped us to write it down. For every recital, we had to learn one of our pieces. Those were also my first lessons in notation, composition and music analysis. And it is why I never had inhibitions about composing, even when I went to the conservatory and I was confronted on my lack of formal training: ‘What, you haven’t done any counterpoint yet?’ They thought that you should finish your studies first before starting to compose in earnest.”

As a child, Michael Jarrell made his way through music history, from Mozart to Beethoven, discovering Chopin, Schubert, Bach and, as a teenager, Stravinsky and Debussy. “It became clear to me that there were no breaks running through the history of music. It continues and there is nothing unusual about it. The big difference between composers of different eras is the way the human place in the world has changed. In Haydn’s works, for example, you just hear that the social structures were clearer and simpler in his time. With Beethoven, things get more complex, and nowadays we live in a world where no one knows how things will turn out.” For Michael Jarrell, his first encounter with new music was hardly the shock it was for other composers of his generation. “You shouldn’t forget that in the military sense of the word, the avant-garde always stays in contact with the main army and cannot just detach from them. Even at its most extreme, the avant-garde is always connected to the world we all live in.”

When he moved from his home town Geneva to Freiburg as a student, however, he also entered into unchartered territory, musically speaking. Here, he explored, step by step, the aesthetics and techniques of contemporary composers, making valuable contacts along the way. “Klaus Huber often told me that my pieces had a French flair to them. This annoyed me and, at the same time, only deepened my affinity to French composers,” he explains laughing. “I am convinced,” he adds, “that our mother tongue, its melody and grammar, shapes how we perceive music.” When he became a professor for composition in Vienna in 1993, he was again reminded of how deep this French streak runs. “In Vienna, the music that appealed to me was considered shallow and playful, and things I didn’t like as much were hyped. But I think these differences are something we should cherish, especially in our times.”

“And that’s what you have to learn as a composer: Who am I and where do I stand?” he continues. “It is my way to get to know myself and evolve, and also to come to terms with who I am.” These early years of professional success proved formative in this regard. Frustrated with a system that is eager to pigeonhole young composers, effectively damning them to repeat themselves again and again, he stopped composing for a year. “The pieces that came after that were very surprising. Before my hiatus, virtuosity had been very important to me, and my music had been quite energetic. I was convinced that music is essentially a play of tension and resolution.” Then I wrote Music for a While, which has a complex form but is based on only a few tones.”

Since then, Michael Jarrell has been careful to create new challenges for himself without losing sight of his identity as a composer. “With my first string quartet Zeitfragmente, for instance, that I wrote for the Arditti Quartet in 1998, I wanted to take new aesthetic risks. So I used something I’d long abandoned, namely working with noises. It was a clear defeat. I recognised that my decision to forgo these things was no coincidence. I always try to move forward, but I cannot rewrite my own history.”

If noises play a role in his music today, it is because Michael Jarrell rediscovered them via a different route. “I was invited to the IRCAM relatively early in my career. That was crucial for me since I’ve always been fascinated by orchestration. The electronics allowed me to further explore the spatial dimension and to study the noises that arise from the transformation of instrumental sounds. My attitude towards noises changed when I noticed that I can create a relation between sounds and noises. Through electronics I learned to incorporate these things into my music, even when I write for acoustic instruments.”

The world premiere of Michael Jarrell’s concerto for string quartet and orchestra Spuren with the Arditti Quartet and Bamberg Symphony under Jonathan Nott will take place on 3 October at 20:30 at Strasbourg’s Palais de la Musique et des Congres, as part of the FestivalMusica.

Nina Rohlfs, 10/2014 | Translation: Christoph Dennerlein

Jeroen Berwaerts – The Art of Busking

The trumpet player Jeroen Berwaerts juggles many balls at once – as a soloist he performs the most virtuosic contemporary trumpet concertos, he is writing a yoga-inspired book on the art of breathing, and develops new and exciting programmes for the recitals he gives with a variety of smaller ensembles. In the following interview, he explains what connects him to the brass band tradition and why singing became an essential part of his trumpet recitals. We met Jeroen Berwaerts at the Bregenz Festival.

KWMM: Jeroen, you have just come out of the dress rehearsal with the Vienna Symphony and Claus Peter Flor. Can you say something about the work you are going to play tonight?

JB: HK Gruber, known to many as Nali, wrote his second trumpet concerto Busking for Håkan Hardenberger, with banjo, accordion and strings. Busking means street music, and accordion and banjo are the poor man’s continuo group, so to speak.

You are only the second trumpeter who has dared to perform the work. What makes it so challenging?

Together with another work by Nali, it is simply the most difficult piece that has ever been written for my instrument, physically speaking. It took me seven months to learn it, and I don’t think many people are willing to make this sacrifice. It is like preparing for Iron Man or a marathon.

In this piece, HK Gruber alludes to a variety of musical genres. Is that something that attracted you to the piece, seeing as you are also at home in different musical worlds?

I do feel a really deep connection to this composer, who is also a conductor and chanson singer. Last night, I heard him performing poetry and chansons. I was very impressed with his ability to captivate his audience as I am a chanson singer myself. When I performed Busking for the first time, I combined it with chansons by Jacques Brel that I sang during the second half of the concert.

… the performance with the Ensemble Resonanz at the Hamburg Music Festival was a great success.

I’ve always been looking for a kind of music that appeals to more than just one audience. This music is more broadly conceived, it has a certain groove to it. HK Gruber is often mentioned in the same breath as Kurt Weill, and indeed both do share a certain freedom of thought. Nonetheless, he speaks a language of his own, one which also differs from established contemporary music.

How did you find your way into music, and when did you come across the different styles that characterise your work today?

I played in brass bands as a teenager. These ensembles hail from England where they were founded by miners. I was also in different funk and pop bands. I had not listened to any real classical music before I was 18. When I began studying the trumpet at the conservatory in Belgium, I also enrolled in jazz singing. Then I decided to concentrate on the trumpet and went to Karlsruhe in Germany where I studied with Reinhold Friedrich. I was very lucky to meet him since he has a very broad outlook. He plays baroque trumpet, contemporary music, in orchestras – he does everything and passed that on to his students.

And when did jazz re-enter into your life?

Later in Vienna, I started a Chet Baker revival band with some people I met there, and then, step by step, I played more and more jazz. Nowadays, there is rarely a trumpet recital where I don’t also sing. This is a wonderful opportunity to develop incredibly varied programmes that speak to a wider audience. When I give a recital that includes songs by Chet Baker and Jacques Brel, there are always many people who wouldn’t attend otherwise. And they get to hear Ligeti and Hindemith and Enescu as well as Telemann and Handel – music which they might not have listened to as much.

You are also working on a book about yoga for wind players. Can you tell us about that?

It’s called The Art of Breathing. I’ve taken yoga lessons for a long time now. It helps me to focus, and I’ve not been nervous onstage for quite a while. For the book, we comprised a variety of exercises to cultivate breathing awareness. The trumpet is a wind instrument, so the air is central. If it flows freely, then the sound of the trumpet does too. That gives you a lot of strength and allows you to take on demanding pieces like Busking.

So, does practice come down to discipline?

Well, practice is more than music. It may also involve physical training, breathing exercises or meditation. But right now I try to get away from the notion that discipline is everything. In the end, strength also requires relaxation. Compare it to interval training in sports, for instance. Until last season, besides all these solo concerts, I also played in the NDR Symphony Orchestra and taught as a professor in Hanover. Now, I have left the orchestra in order to focus on my solo career. That has been a very important step for me.

You returned to the NDR Symphony Orchestra as the soloist in Toshio Hosokawa’s new trumpet concerto, a piece for which you also gave the world premiere in Tokyo and that you have just performed with the NHK Symphony Orchestra.

To me this is really one of the best contemporary trumpet concertos, together with HK Gruber’s works. It is just so beautiful and intimate. It is based on a poem by Hermann Hesse, Im Nebel. The solo trumpet represents a person who is walking through the woods – the orchestra –, and sometimes you hear me, sometimes you don’t. A few weeks before the world premiere, I was in Takefu where Toshio’s festival takes place. One month earlier, I had just performed a piece by Peter Eötvös, Jetstream. It contains a cadenza for which I tried different techniques, such as removing the mouth piece and singing right into the trumpet. I liked this effect because it is a bridge between playing and singing, the difference seems to disappear. I showed that to Toshio, and he used it in his work to create some terrific and very moving moments.

Of course, you have also immersed yourself in the classical trumpet repertoire. How important is that for you?

My task, as I see it, is to try to understand the language of the composer and, as a kind of medium, communicate it to the audience. That’s why I’m also interested in the Baroque trumpet, for instance. But I’m touring with so many demanding pieces right now – Hosokawa, Gruber, Shostakovich, Zimmermann –, you have to pace yourself physically and mentally in order to handle this. Playing these works has really become my thing, my language. With regard to new works for trumpet, we all have Håkan Hardenberger to thank, and also Reinhold Friedrich who had many great works written for him. Of course, I enjoy playing world premieres but I also want to perform all these great works – by Gruber, Ligeti, Birtwistle and Rihm – that already exist. It would be a crime to let this magnificent repertoire fall silent.

Nina Rohlfs 08/2014 | Translation: Christoph Dennerlein

A lost flâneur: Johannes Maria Staud on his new opera

Johannes Maria Staud characterises the protagonist of his music-theatre work Die Antilope as “a young man who refuses to yield to society’s demands in an unusual way”. The libretto of the work, which will be premiered during the composer’s residency at the Lucerne Festival, was developed with the poet Durs Grünbein. Unlike in their previous collaboration on the opera after Edgar Allan Poe, Grünbein and Staud did not use any existing literary model. The composer spoke of his new opera to the dramaturge Christian Kipper from Lucerne Theatre, which commissioned the work together with Lucerne Festival.

Victor, the only named character in this opera, is essentially a tragic hero: he jumps out of a window in order to escape an office party and encounters various figures from whom he remains alienated, without ever being able to break through his isolation. What kind of character is that?

Victor is the common thread in this cyclical work who guarantees cohesion throughout the episodes. The remaining characters, who are exemplary, simplistic, exaggerated types that we all know, remain accessories as it were, the background onto which Victor’s strange interactions with his surroundings are quintessentially portrayed. Again and again, Victor protests against being subjected to clearly defined roles, something which seems a given in his world. He doesn’t want to conform to society, breaks free and therefore also speaks another language in a grand act of Dadaist liberation, which must remain incomprehensible to those around him. Nevertheless, he continues to try and make contact in the varied situations into which he stumbles – but in precisely his own way. Victor is not a “classic” outsider, a castoff in the mould of Wozzeck or Billy Budd. I see him more as a flâneur who wanders the earth, who doesn’t belong anywhere, but observes everything around him very precisely. His forlornness may indeed be read as a symptom of modernity in which communication becomes increasingly meaningless, reduced to empty clichés. Victor remains a puzzle until the very end, making him something of a musical figure.

There is one scene that takes place in a zoo but it hardly explains the title. Why is the work called Die Antilope

When you listen carefully to the libretto, many animal metaphors crop up. Animals are of course beings that we more or less live with and that possess their own kind of communication that we can only follow to some extent. Victor, with his own language, can somehow approach these beings. Perhaps he feels particularly close to the antelope as a tenacious, erratic animal that is often on the run, fearing for its life? The gobbledygook that Victor speaks – during the working process, Durs and I called it “antelopish” – basically relies on different artificial languages. In one scene, for instance, he speaks Esperanto, which is appealing because the meaning of the words also filters through to those who do not speak the language. When we were creating Victor’s language – in principle he speaks a different language in every scene – we combined our playful instincts, our enjoyment of phonetic peculiarities with a systematic puzzle, the encoding of hidden content. It is not important whether the spectator sees through the system. Much more important is that the hero’s failed attempts at communicating are central. Only at one point does Victor receive an answer in his language, albeit from a sculpture – the decisive turning point in our opera.

What is the role of the music in this work?

We didn’t think an awful lot about the relationship between text and music. We didn’t want to create a literary opera in the conventional sense of the word but at the same time, we also didn’t want to stifle the plot by favouring static music images. It was supposed to be somewhere in the middle, hovering between narration and exaggeration, between realism and absurdity. The music has to take into account the comprehensibility of the text, but ought also to inject meaning, deceive, seduce and imply the un-said. In some places we have employed speech because the recitative has no place in my compositional style. Alongside the individual situations, the figures are also characterised with the help of the music although I, like every composer, had to be careful not to fall into clichés. However, for me it is important that there is also a part of the composition that remains unexplained, something unexpected that captivates and engages us.

Most of your experience lies in instrumental music. You are currently composing a violin concerto for the Lucerne Festival. What do you have to do “differently” when you compose an opera?

My instrumental music is essentially based on dramatic principles: it is always about a precisely calibrated build-up of tension. Each of my compositions is a small drama, even without text. Nevertheless, one has to go about composing an opera differently because you have to keep in mind what is happening on the stage. The music must not only follow its own rules as is the case in an instrumental work. The dramatic situation is decisive for the compositional process but is also very inspiring for me as a composer. That is why I contributed so much during the development of the libretto, constantly discussing with Durs in a climate of deep artistic trust. It always started with a vague atmosphere, which we then defined more and more precisely. For some scenes I needed more text, for others less. During this process, Durs’ ability to communicate the essential points succinctly and with a poetic emphasis came in very handy. I find it dull to receive a finished text which I am supposed to then set to music. I gain my inspiration through ideas, exchange and collaboration. In this way, the libretto was developed at the same time as the music.

Christian Kipper, 08/2014 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

‘No one can understand the text’ – DIALOGUES Festival focuses on the music of György Ligeti

The Mozarteum Foundation’s Dialogues Festival this year revolves around the theme Word. It is not by chance that György Ligeti’s works – alongside those of Mozart and Peter Eötvös – form the focus of the festival: Ligeti has repeatedly examined the sound of the human voice and the structure of linguistic communication in his works.

The festival’s opening concert on 3 December will feature the Hungarian composer’s Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures for three singers and seven instrumentalists with the Ensemble musikFabrik. Ligeti developed a text together with the music that grammatically and semantically has no meaning in order to express, “human emotions that are ritualised through social conventions such as approval and disagreement, domination and submission, honesty and lying, arrogance, disobedience, indeed the subtlest nuances of irony that are hidden behind apparent approval, and of esteem that are concealed behind apparent contempt”. Of the two pieces, Ligeti went on to write, “No one can understand the text. Even I cannot understand it and I wrote it. (…) In the Aventures, there are several layers of the strange, the anxious, the very aggressive, the sentimental and the erotic.”

The film version of the work, which was recorded by the ensemble die reihe under Friedrich Cerha in 1971 and directed by Klaus Lindemann, will also be shown in Salzburg (4 December). The film programme will be accompanied by All Clouds Are Clocks, a 1976 BBC portrait film about György Ligeti by Leslie Megahey, as well as Stanley Kubrick’s cult science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The soundtrack, which features alongside Atmosphères, a series of further works by Ligeti, contributed significantly to the composer’s popularity outside the New Music community.

The Musicbanda FRANUI offers an unusual approach to Ligeti’s music on 4 December with Wolfgang Mitterer on organ and electronics as part of their project dealing with the dance music of the Alpine valleys. Excerpts from Ligeti’s compositions Balada Si Joc (Ballad and dance for two violins), Három lakodalmi tánc (three wedding dances for piano, four hands) and Música Ricercata will be performed in a new arrangement conceived by the ensemble, as well as in their original versions.

On 7 December, Artikulation will be the main topic of a lecture concert with Stefan Fricke and Peter Eötvös. György Ligeti composed the work in 1958 and even at that time, he was using electronic music to evoke an imaginary conversation, in which he replaced semantics with the newly acquired sounds.

After performances of the famous Continuo for Cello (Florian Birsack on 4 December) and the String Quartet No. 2 (Calder Quartet on 5 December), two larger works can be heard towards the end of the festival: Melodien für Orchester will be performed by the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg under Peter Eötvös on 6 December before Ligeti’s Lux aeterna for 16-voice mixed chorus a cappella sung by the Salzburg Bach Choir closes the Dialogues on 7 December.

You can read the full programme here .

Nina Rohlfs, 11/2014 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

François-Frédéric Guy – 'The Beethoven Project'

He plays Bartók, Brahms and Prokofiev in the world’s great concert halls, works closely with contemporary composers such as Bruno Mantovani and Marc Monnet, his recording of Liszt’s Harmonies poetiques et religieuses has received glowing reviews – however the key element of pianist François-Frédéric Guy’s musical world is Ludwig van Beethoven. He describes in poetic language his special relationship to the composer’s works: “You plunge into them as if on a deep-sea expedition and discover a secret world, which seems familiar and mysterious at the same time.”

François-Frédéric Guy has recorded practically all of Beethoven’s piano works on CD in concert cycles. His recording of all 32 piano sonatas was released last autumn on the label Zig Zag Territoires, for example. But it took a while to get to that point. The highly gifted child grew up in a small town in Normandy and started receiving lessons with Dominique Merlet at the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of 11. After taking part in a tour for young pianists, in which six French pianists of his generation performed the cycle of Beethoven sonatas, he took it upon himself to master all of the sonatas before his 40th birthday. Now, he can regularly be heard performing the cycle, which he premiered at the 2008 Monaco Festival in a series of ten concerts over the course of twelve days. In the 2014/15 season he will also be performing it in Rio de Janeiro and Pordenone in Italy.

In addition to the complete sonatas, he has recorded all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos. The pianist, who at the start of his career almost decided to go down the route of conducting, is leading orchestras from the piano with increasing frequency. However, for the recordings released on the Naïve label, his close confidante Philippe Jordan conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. “We feel like chamber music partners,” the pianist says of their relationship.

François-Frédéric Guy has found genuine chamber music partners for the next stage of his project: he collaborated with violinist Tedi Papavrami and cellist Xavier Phillips for concerts in Arsenal de Metz, which has become a musical home for him as Artist in Residence over the course of several seasons. In this way, François-Frédéric Guy is not far off having performed literally all of the works which Beethoven wrote for the piano in concert cycles. Does this mean that his personal Beethoven project will soon be over? “Not at all, you can never be done with Beethoven,” he claims. In the decades to come, he still wants to be diving into the ocean of Beethoven’s works. He’s not afraid of becoming bored; aside from Beethoven, in the last few months he has also performed Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 5 in Zurich, Bartók’s second piano concerto in Warsaw and Scriabin’s Prométhée in Monte Carlo. And on top of all this, François-Frederic Guy may also be preparing himself for the next world premiere.

You can find detailed information on François-Frédéric Guy's Beethoven project here .

Nina Rohlfs 03/2014 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Interview in French:

Interview in English:

The Gringolts Quartet: Friends for Life

“I couldn‘t live without playing string quartets,” says Ilya Gringolts, and that is how the Gringolts Quartet came into existence. At 15 to 20 concerts per year, it has become a substantial part of the violinist’s musical agenda. In August, for instance, the four string players can be heard at the Salzburg Festival and the Menuhin Festival Gstaad.

“For me, it wasn’t enough to just perform as a soloist or in the occasional chamber music setting,” explains Ilya Gringolts. He shares his love for the vast string quartet repertory with his wife, the violinist Anahit Kurtikyan, with whom he founded the ensemble in 2008. “The repertoire is incredibly diverse and you could spend a lifetime on the Haydn quartets alone. Our approach, on the other hand, is to try and play as many different works as possible, including contemporary ones.”

In Salzburg the couple, together with violist Silvia Simionescu and cellist Claudius Herrmann, will perform Marc-André Dalbavie’s 2012 string quartet. It will feature alongside the world premiere of his new opera Charlotte Salomon. The Dalbavie quartet will be complemented by Ravel’s only string quartet as well as the original string septet version of Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen which is now more widely known in the version for 23 solo strings.

In 2013, their recording of the septet was awarded the ECHO Klassik for the best chamber music recording of the year. On the same CD, the Gringolts Quartet and cellist David Geringas juxtaposed the Metamorphosen with the roughly contemporaneous string quintet by the Nazi-persecuted composer Walter Braunfels. The music magazine Rondo described it as “a CD that not only invites but almost compels the listeners to let themselves become immersed in the music.”

The ensemble’s first CD with chamber music works by Robert Schumann was met with similar enthusiasm. In a review, the magazine KulturSpiegel noted that, “from the violin sonatas to the piano quintet, everything is thrilling and well-executed.” Peter Laul, the pianist who joined the quartet for the Schumann CD, was also involved in their most recent release on Orchid Classics, a complete recording of Brahms’ three string quartets and his piano quintet. Together with pianist Leon Fleisher the quartet will be performing the latter piece in concert in Gstaad.

“In a string quartet, a real friendship grows out of the music,” says Ilya Gringolts on the inner workings of the quartet. As the first three entries in their discography already demonstrate, these bonds of friendship extend to a number of high-profile chamber music partners as well. For the four members of the quartet themselves, it is their friendship that allows them to make plans for the long-term: to explore, work by work, the wonders of the quartet repertoire and at the same time break new musical ground with world premieres. “Under these premises, I’m sure we can look ahead to a long history together.”

Nina Rohlfs, 07/2014 | Translation: Christoph Dennerlein

The one with knowledge exists through his knowledge – Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s 'Mansūr'

Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s Mansūr for large choir, four brass players and two percussionists received its world premiere at the Salzburg Festival on 26 July 2014 with great success. The work, which was commissioned by the Festival, is based on texts by and reflections on the Sufi mystic Mansūr Al-Hallāğ (858-922), with which the composer has dealt with in several of his works already. This article originally appeared in the Salzburg Festival programme booklet for the world premiere.

Mansūr begins with low drum beats, hardly audible, sounding from behind the audience, appearing out of nowhere besides the rhythmic singing of a few singers. Upon closer inspection, the whole piece reveals itself during this simple start: Samir Odeh-Tamimi has split the text between four choir groups. These, as well as the instrumentalists, are positioned around the audience in the room. The composer does not distribute the different registers and instruments symmetrically but lets them form triangles with voices and instruments throughout the whole room. When the trombones and percussion then combine with these tones, the acoustic space extends right out into the whole church. He pitches individual notes extremely high or low in order to enlarge this space and envelop the audience in piano and pianissimo notes or captivate them with mezzo forte or fortes.

The first low notes played by the instruments lay the foundations for the basic element of the piece, the text from the The Garden of Knowledge by Mansūr Al-Hallāğ. He is quoted straight away in the first few bars: "she is not him and he is not her, and only she is him and only he is her." The explosive power of the mystic Mansūr Al-Hallāğ’s message can already be gleaned in these verses, which still seem confusing at first glance. He invited his followers not to look for new definitions for and images of Allah. According to Mansūr Al-Hallāğ you will only find true knowledge within yourself. For Samir Odeh-Tamimi, these are the central verses, so dense and meaningful in terms of content that he practically lets them ring out on their own.

The Sufi rhythm in which Mansūr Al-Hallāğ wrote these verses becomes the rhythmic foundation for the music. Even if Samir Odeh-Tamimi says that he is not a religious man and that he did not write this work for religious reasons, this Sufi rhythm does mean a lot to him musically speaking. The dance-like triple rhythm, with a spring in its step, a rhythm which has a light movement to it, has been with him since childhood. It is a rhythm that is alive, that is changing. It leads him back to the Sufi rituals prescribed during prayer, which he experienced as a child with his grandfather who led such rituals as a Sufi master, a ritual that took place in secret and which could transport the partaker into a trance. But this rhythm was also present in his day-to-day life, when his grandmother continually muttered the verses in the Sufi rhythm or moved her lips wordlessly, running a string of beads through her fingers. This build-up and constant repetition of the Sufi rhythm can lead to a trance-like state, which for many signifies the absolute path to religious knowledge.

Samir Odeh-Tamimi has linked this physical, meditative ritual with Mansūr Al-Hallāğ’s philosophical insight. In the Sufi rhythms of his texts, Odeh-Tamimi has given the words, "she is not him and he is not her, and only she is him and only he is her," to the singers as a recitative. In the hand-written score, one can see these words graphically distributed on the page so that their movement in the room can be recognised, the movement through the room in which the audience sits.

The composer interrupts these passages that are dominated by this rhythm with musical interludes in the form of sometimes wild, loud, dense sounds. Often, Odeh-Tamimi builds clusters of neighbouring notes around the central tone F-sharp, producing sharp dissonances and creating passages of hightened tension in the process. They interrupt for a moment the flow of the Sufi rhythm, which induces a trance-like state. They lead into the musical world of Samir Odeh-Tamimi, which he developed after immersing himself in the music of Arnold Schönberg, Younghi Pagh-Paan and many contemporary composers.

It is a world through which he has been accompanied by Mansūr Al-Hallāğ’s philosophy, resulting not only in works that use texts by Al-Hallāğ but also lots of sketches that he had in mind during the working process and which he inserted into "Mansūr" at specific points. During the compositional process, his thoughts became more concrete and, looking back on what he had already written, individual notes emerged that he then placed throughout the room. During the interludes, Samir Odeh-Tamimi works without concrete texts, with breathing sounds in the voices and open vocals, written in Greek because for him, this language embodies the archaic fundamental form of language. Again and again, there is a reduction to a deeply tranquil sound from these musical spaces, from which the voices are able to soar anew.

While the male voices ruminate for a while over Mansūr Al-Hallāğ’s confusing mysteries – "he is not her and she is not him" – dominating the soundscape, the female voices suddenly appear. They sing about Allah and articulate Mansūr Al-Hallāğ’s knowledge: "The one with knowledge is the one who can see, and knowledge is eternal, the one with knowledge exists through his knowledge."

This Arabic text is supposed to be articulated like a German text by the choir. Samir Odeh-Tamimi expects an inner understanding. And those who have understood are persuasive in their assertions. This attitude can be traced back to a key experience that the composer, who has lived in Germany for 24 years, had. Someone read a German poem aloud and, even if he wouldn’t have been able to translate every word directly, he understood the secret of the text.

In the original handwritten score of "Mansūr," there are few corrections. Samir Odeh-Tamimi felt challenged for the first time, not simply to cut, copy, paste and rework material during the compositional process, but also to document the knowledge he gained in his own handwriting, handwriting that perfectly shows his logic.

In the score, Samir Odeh-Tamimi notes tempi that range from "legatissimo" to "as fast as possible," suggesting that it is not purely a matter of speeding-up but more of changing the inner attitude, a process of letting go not unlike what we find in a Sufi ritual. Right at the end only individual syllables are left. Concepts fade away, but the knowledge remains.

Margarete Zander, 07/2014 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Tracing 'A Worcester Ladymass'

When Henry VIII set off on his quest to dissolve monasteries throughout his kingdom, this was a turning point not only for religion and economy, but also for the history of English music: while the king, a keen musician himself, is today known as a patron of Renaissance composers, his systematic destruction of the monastic libraries in the 1530s account for the fact that only a minute amount of mediaeval sacred music was preserved – many manuscripts merely survived because they were set aside as scrap paper.

The three sopranos of Trio Mediaeval chose to consider the gaps in historic evidence as a chance when they decided to reconstruct a "Ladymass", based on fragments of music manuscripts from the Worcester monastery: "We did not despair when we found out that there was no Credo to be found in the manuscripts," Anna Maria Friman explains. "We immediately saw the possibility of including a contemporary Credo and asked Gavin Bryars to compose the piece."

Votive Masses to the Virgin Mary were frequent in mediaeval England, which was then called the "Garden of Mary" because of its special devotion to her. While the Mass could be reconstructed with some accuracy thanks to the disproportionate amount of music associated with Marian feasts to be found among the fragments, looking for the same kind of accuracy in performance practice seems for the trio to be an effort doomed to failure: "We have no precise descriptions regarding sound or singing techniques being used, and we don’t know to what extent women sang polyphonic music," says Anna Maria Friman. "However much we might wish it, we cannot in any way be historically authentic. Meanwhile we feel that the lack of historical information gives us the freedom to let our imagination flow as though we are creating contemporary music."

The members of the trio are aware of the fact that they re-contextualise the music in many ways when they present mediaeval sacred music in a modern concert setting. And all the more so by delivering it to the listener via CD – a recording for the ECM label was released in 2011. But however far from the context of a mediaeval church service their performance may be, according to the New York Times, the beauty and clarity of the three voices "might cause even a confirmed agnostic to contemplate a spark of divinity in these centuries-old manuscripts."

You can listen to extracts from A Worcester Ladymass here .

A new Liszt – the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo on their latest CD

The GrauSchumacher Piano Duo is currently documenting one part of their varied repertoire with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in a series of three CDs recorded with the contemporary music label NEOS Music. Wulf Weinmann, head of NEOS Music, talks to the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo and Stefan Heucke about their collaboration on the duo’s Concerti II CD, which was released in January 2014.

Wulf Weinmann: Stefan Heucke’s arrangement of Liszt’s Concerto pathétique for two pianos and orchestra is something really unique. How did the idea for this version come into being?

Andreas Grau: First of all, we wanted to close a gap in the repertoire. There isn’t really a large romantic concerto for us piano duos. Neither Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky nor Brahms have written for this combination. The two concertos by Mendelssohn are early works written by a 13 or 14 year-old child prodigy and are, for all their qualities, not comparable with his solo piano concerto or violin concerto. Bruch’s double concerto is not on the same level as his violin concerto. Things really only pick up again in the 20th century with Poulenc and Bartók. Secondly, we really value Stefan Heucke not only as a composer who has written many original works for us, which we frequently perform in our concerts, but also as a superb arranger for varied combinations of instruments of composers such as Schubert, Brahms, Mahler and Janacek. This arrangement of Liszt was therefore very important for us.

Götz Schumacher: A recreation of this kind is legitimised not least through the huge number of versions of the work produced by Liszt and his pupils. The starting point for the work is the “great concerto solo” from 1851 in which Liszt experiments with a one-movement form, which is actually made up of four movements – similar to the famous sonata in B minor. He later rearranged the “concerto solo” for two pianos and published it under the title Concerto pathétique with Breitkopf in Leipzig. Later versions include further arrangements for two pianos as well as for solo piano with orchestra by various pupils of Liszt e.g. Hans von Bülow, Eduard Reuss (corrected by Liszt), Richard Burmeister and Gábor Darvas.

Wulf Weinmann: Stefan Heucke, you have dedicated this transcription of Liszt’s for two pianos and orchestra to the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo with whom you have worked closely for many years. Is this transcription a revised version in the spirit of Liszt?

Stefan Heucke: That’s what it is. A revised version with the sound that is now possible from a modern orchestra. There are a few examples of some unusual sound combinations: piano and harp, piano and string tremolo and glissandi from the piano and timpani. There is also a monumental orchestral climax, which culminates in an extremely loud tam-tam beat.

Wulf Weinmann: But Liszt’s original piano part remains untouched?

Stefan Heucke: Yes, but I have composed a completely new orchestral part on top of this. Liszt could definitely have chosen the notes but he almost certainly would not have chosen this instrumentation. The orchestral resources are, at least partly, those of postmodernism. The process can be compared with Ravel’s instrumentation of Mussorgsky’s . It’s as if Liszt, Wagner, Strauss and Shostakovich all decided to compose a concerto together for two pianos and orchestra and Stefan Heucke contributed the cadenza. I added this approximately five minute-long cadenza for both soloists alone in my very own style at just the point where Hans von Bülow also added a cadenza in his arrangement.

CD Release │January 2014
neos 21302 [Coproduction with Deutschlandradio Kultur] available to order now

Master of the Krechts – The klezmer clarinettist David Krakauer

David Krakauer, a classically trained clarinettist with degrees from the Juilliard School of Music in New York, has devoted much of his adult life to the art of klezmer. Krakauer had his first encounter with klezmer music in 1980, when he heard the Eastern European Jewish klezmer master Dave Tarras play live. “Although he was already quite old and technically not so precise,” David recalled his playing, “he created a sound that sent a shiver down my spine. It was totally unforgettable!”

For centuries, klezmer music was the standard music of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe and was played at all weddings and celebrations. Klezmer music incorporates many ideas from Greek, Balkan, Eastern European and Roma folk music and it is dance music, made for dancing while holding hands or with a partner. Krakauer explains that it is the influence of cantorial synagogue music that sets klezmer music apart from other forms of folk music. “In particular the ornament called krechts, a sob or squeeze in Yiddish, is a sound that makes klezmer immediately recognisable. The is produced by playing little ghosted notes between the main notes. This gives the illusion of the emotional catch in the voice reminiscent of the plaintive supplication found in cantorial singing.” The klezmer style strives to replicate the human voice – the cries, laughs and wails of humanity.

Scores of Eastern European Jews immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and they brought klezmer music with them. Klezmer music flourished in Jewish circles in the early 20th century, as did Yiddish theatre and the art of Jewish Cantor song. Klezmer music in the United States began to draw influence from American music, especially jazz. David Krakauer also played jazz as a teenager, and he cites his first great musical influence as Sidney Bechet, the great New Orleans jazz clarinettist. “Hearing his music lead me to a great love of jazz in general, and more specifically to a deep reverence for the tremendous individuality of artists such as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and the great Duke Ellington. When I started to play klezmer, I was able to weave these influences, in conjunction with Avant-garde classical and jazz sounds, into ‘traditional’ klezmer to create my own personal style of improvising.”

The children of these turn-of-the-century immigrants, however, began to assimilate into American culture and by the 1960s, interest in klezmer music had largely died out. Then, in the 1970s, the first klezmer revival began in the United States, led by soloists such as Giora Feidman and bands such as The Klezmorim. These musicians attempted to accurately recreate klezmer music from the early 20th century from old recordings and surviving klezmer musicians in the United States.

While working in New York as a classical musician, Krakauer began experimenting with klezmer music as the second klezmer revival began in the 1980s. In the late 1980s, Krakauer joined The Klezmatics, with whom he toured around the world. Bands like the Klezmatics put their own personal stamp on the music of earlier generations. “When I played with the Klezmatics, it was not about re-performing old songs. We had amplifiers, we were loud and we had an attitude almost like a punk band,” Krakauer said in an interview with Radio Berlin-Brandenburg in 2011. Klezmer music gained many non-Jewish fans in both the United States and Europe. In his early days with the Klezmatics, the band travelled to Berlin. The experience was incredible. “Suddenly, we were at this Festival in Berlin. We played in front of thousands of young Berliners and they were all partying, and I thought, It’s different here.” In talking to people throughout Europe while on tour, Krakauer has found that people are moved to see the evolution of a European music that came from Eastern Europe to America and then returned to Europe, transformed by the American experience. Over the past two decades, klezmer has also become a statement of support for multiculturalism in Europe. “Jews before the Second World War were the multicultural Europeans. Playing Jewish klezmer music seems to be a pro-multicultural, pro-humanistic political act without ever being didactic or waving a flag,” says Krakauer.

Composers have recently also succumbed to klezmer’s appeal. David Krakauer is now a highly sought-after soloist and chamber musician and has demonstrated his wealth of experience in classical and klezmer music with pieces written especially for him such as Wlad Marhulet’s Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet and Orchestra, which he performed in June 2012 with the Orchestre National de Lyon, and Osvaldo Golijov’s . He recorded and toured with the Kronos Quartet and has performed the string orchestra version in Detroit, Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Ulster, and Madrid among other cities. He also tours with his bands Klezmer Madness!, which continues to broaden the horizons of klezmer music, and Abraham Inc., which fuses klezmer with funk and hip-hop.

The Big PictureCheckpoint Akoka – Reframing Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time

Rachel Kelly, 04/2012

Arditti Quartet celebrates 40th Anniversary

On 7 March 1974, the Arditti Quartet gave their very first concert at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Their debut, which included works by Luciano Berio, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Stanley Haynes and Witold Lutoslawski would already pave the way for programmes focusing on contemporary music in the years to come. Since then, the string quartet has characterised the musical history of its time like no other. During the four decades of its existence, the ensemble has performed over 7,400 works in more than 2,000 concerts, over 600 of which were world premieres of works that were often composed especially for the ensemble. The founder Irvine Arditti reflects on the first 40 years of the Arditti Quartet with Karsten Witt.

KW: When you founded the Arditti Quartet in 1974, were you already specialised in contemporary music, or did you envisage a traditional string quartet playing the whole repertoire?

IA: I was intrigued by contemporary music, listening to Boulez and Xenakis, when I was 11 and 12. I wanted to go and meet Stockhausen and hear concerts live. When I was 15, I went to Oxford to hear the French Radio Orchestra playing Xenakis’ orchestral pieces and Messiaen and I met both of them on that occasion. This was in 1968; my mother took me, she wouldn’t let me go on my own. My interest in contemporary music stems from these very early years. I wanted to form a quartet in London that played contemporary music rather than what everyone else was doing.

Were you aware that you were the first quartet doing this?

I just wanted a quartet in London which would play Ligeti, Lutoslawski and Takemitsu because there was no English string quartet that would want to do that. I had no visions of where the Arditti Quartet would be going.

Were you already thinking of new compositions?

Not at all. We were playing in universities in London and England. The first concert was of course at the Royal Academy of Music on 7 March 1974. But I never thought about composers writing for us. I knew Jonathan Harvey; we played in an improvisation group together and we actually performed the instrumental version of Stockhausen’s Hymnen in London – he played the keyboard and I played the viola. He was interested in the quartet and invited us to Southampton University. He was the first person who wanted to write a string quartet for us; this was in 1978 or 1979. So that was the beginning.

How did you find your partners for the quartet?

They were all initially students at the Royal Academy of Music.

To find people who would devote so much of their time to only playing contemporary music was something new…

… and something that is much easier today. In those days it was quite tricky and we had to really search people out, to see if they might be interested in spending long hours rehearsing with composers, all sorts of different styles.

Given the development to what you are today, do you have the impression the world was waiting for you or was it a struggle?

Neither. We started off with income from other things. It was a hobby that became a profession. It was our pure interest and the accumulation of what we were doing that stimulated us; we weren’t pushed into it by anyone. We met composers, they were enthusiastic about what we were doing and we therefore did it more and more. So it just happened, it gradually became professional and a full-time occupation.

Nowadays you are performing all over the world. Was it a London phenomenon at the beginning?

No, we were not an English phenomenon. We had some good reviews for a concert where we did Nono, Ferneyhough 2 and Carter 3; we had an amazing review from Paul Griffiths in the Times. People started noticing us. But abroad we were noticed more, particularly in Germany. We were playing extensively in most other countries before England realised that they had an interesting international group on their doorstep.

But how did you find your first concerts – did you call people up and offer your services, or did it go through composers?

No, Allied Artists were our agent.

They also worked for a number of composers at the time.

They introduced us to both Henze and Ligeti and they engaged us for our first professional concert in the Roundhouse. They had a series there. Outside of the academy this was our first professional concert in London.

I looked at the year 2012 and found that you gave 56 concerts with 45 premieres of new compositions. Obviously you are still driven by new work and curiosity and your relationships with composers. What is your own impression during these 40 years, what has changed?

Things have developed. We are now associated with many more composers. Some of them are no longer with us. The styles have become much more diverse. There was much less openness for people to do what they really wanted in 1974. People were more pigeonholed into being a member of a serial group or a follower of a Cage-tied philosophy, or writing more classical music influenced by Britten or Shostakovich. Full minimalism hadn’t come into being at that point. With each composer developing his own new style, different challenges have presented themselves to us. The contemporary world has changed a lot in 40 years, but we still have the richness of what was there at the beginning.

It seems that there is also more interest – there are larger audiences, there are more and more traditional festivals that also present contemporary music and even commission new works. The whole environment in which you are operating seems to have changed.

It has and it hasn’t. It’s become more extensive, but also a lot of societies have disappeared through lack of funding. I think one of the interesting things about the Arditti Quartet is that we have had a very diverse career. We’ve not only gone to new music festivals and series but also played in chamber music series like other more classical quartets.

Did this happen from the start, or was it a later phenomenon when some of the contemporary music, which you played, had become part of the repertoire?

It was a slightly later phenomenon, and it occurred with our first agents in Italy and Germany. But from the beginning we also played Bartok etc. That made us very different from the new music ensembles, which also started in the 70s. And it gave us a different audience. We never played only classical music though, I would always insist on playing at least one contemporary piece in the programme.

Has it ever been the case that a promoter wanted to commission a new work to a composer and you said no?

Yes. But if a promoter is really enthusiastic, I say: if you think that this person can do something good, then let’s go ahead.

Was it the same when you started? Did you take a position towards the quality of the compositions that you performed?

Obviously when you’re starting off, people ask you to do things and you do them. There was such a rich pallet of composers that had written pieces or were just about to write pieces for us, there were so many possibilities for amazing things. There were lots of composers whom I didn’t know so I took the advice from promoters. Some of them weren’t so marvellous, but you have to go through the process in order to find what’s good and you shouldn’t expect every piece to be a masterpiece. If I really didn’t like something I would say that from the beginning.

Did it ever happen that you only discovered the quality of a piece after a number of performances?

Sometimes, with more insight and actually listening to the piece – which is important, not just rehearsing it and playing it in concert – you realise that it can be more interesting than you thought when you were first working on it. So from that point of view, it’s good to give things a chance, even if they don’t look that stimulating to begin with. Also with young composers that we know are not so interesting, they need us to play their music well, so they can hear what they wrote. That service to students or young professional composers is very important. But of course, when you are presenting things to concert audiences that are paying money, you base your choice on some sort of qualitative decision.

You have performed Ligeti’s 2nd Quartet more than 250 times. Would you say your interpretation, your understanding of this piece has changed during this period?

Not dramatically, no. We worked on the piece with Ligeti and found out how he wanted it to go. We worked with him periodically over the years when we changed players in the quartet. And I explained to my new colleagues exactly what he wanted. I think it hasn’t changed. We try to keep up the image of those first times we worked with him. Of course, with each new group of Arditti Quartet members the interpretation changes slightly and has a different sort of depth or sonority. But the basic interpretation has remained the same.

I imagine that when you played Lachenmann for the first time, maybe you needed a few performances before you got into such a piece.

Yes, with Lachenmann it is entirely different, because you are not dealing with the traditional pallet of sounds. It took a bit longer with that music because of the different techniques and getting used to doing them. I was not happy with our first few performances of Lachenmann’s first quartet, Gran Torso. But he had the confidence to keep working with us and continually inspired us and it wasn’t so long before we became comfortable. Now it’s like a language that we can speak and understand every word of.

You mentioned the other players of the Arditti Quartet. Obviously, you are the continuous factor here – 40 years Arditti Quartet means 40 years of Irvine with other players.

Rohan de Saram stayed for 26 years. Levine Andrade, the first viola player, was there until 1990, he stayed for 16 years, that’s quite a long time. They were the two longest members.

From other quartets, we know that the change of one member can mean a crisis for the whole ensemble but in your case, there has been an enormous continuity, no matter who was performing. How did it work?

In the beginning it was very daunting when someone left. In those days it was more difficult to find a replacement. We looked everywhere and asked lots of people for their advice and if they knew people. We even went as far afield as to talk to Elliott Carter when we were looking for a second violin, before Graeme Jennings played with us. There was a group in San Francisco who played Elliott’s quartets and I remember him telling me about the second violin who he thought was very good. So I phoned him up to ask who this person was and if he could give me some contact information. Now there are quite a lot of players whom you can approach: people in orchestras interested in new music, there are a lot of ensembles or other contemporary string quartets.

It’s still daunting, of course, when someone leaves, but the quartet is not about the people in it, it’s about what it does. I define the quartet as having a very particular theme: playing contemporary music, working with composers, creating new pieces. Then there is the vast repertoire that has been written for us since those early days of Jonathan Harvey’s first quartet. Anyone that comes into the quartet knows that and has to follow that theme. It is clearly defined and reiterated daily by me, who has the experience of working with the composers, including ones that are no longer with us. I am that constant memory and reminder of what the quartet is, was and will continue to be. In a way it’s a bit easier for people coming in. They have their own individual personality and can do things the way they want to. But the rules are set.

KWMM, 03/2014

Metaphysical adventure or technical matter?

On 2 March 2014, Mark Andre’s first opera will receive its world premiere at the Oper Stuttgart. The dramaturge Patrick Hahn conceived the project together with the composer and writes about their research trip to Israel.

There is no time for an extended welcome when we meet each other for the first time at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport: the composer Mark Andre, the sound engineer Joachim Haas from the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, our Isreali driver David and myself. It takes a while for our recording devices and microphones to be cleared by customs. At this time of day, the streets are traffic-jammed and we have to hurry to get to Jerusalem in time before heaving our bulky equipment through the winding alleys of the old city. At 7pm, the doors of the Church of the Resurrection will close until 4.30am. We will spend the night locked-up inside this cold place of pilgrimage, together with Franciscans, Armenians, Greek-Orthodox monks, our recording equipment turned on. That we may do so at all is due to the diplomatic skills of Georg Blochmann, the director of the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv who managed to obtain an exception permit for us. As long as we don’t disturb the monks in their rituals, we can gauge the acoustics of the Church of the Resurrection and save the data on our hard drives – the raw material for an adventure that will only reach its conclusion in a few years' time. Welcome to a "metaphysical road trip".

Patrick Hahn: Mark, why did you want to come to the Holy Land in preparation for your opera project?

Mark Andre: I’m here to take acoustical photos, or echographies. I collect different sorts of material, that will be categorised, analysed and musically "unfolded". So, on the one hand this is about measuring, about parameterisation and getting an acoustic representation of the space and the acoustical situation within. On the other hand, there is my hope that these spaces and situations carry a certain significance which we can capture and "unfold". There is always something that is beyond the scope of computer-based sound analysis. This is where the subjective experience comes into play.

Since we first started talking about his opera project, Mark has always used the metaphor of the metaphysical road trip to describe what he had in mind. It is an image for the journey on which the composer embarks in the process of composing, as well as a hint of what listeners are to expect in a few years when they explore the piece in Stuttgart. But it also describes a method. The composer has left his desk in Berlin-Friedrichshain in order to lay the basis for his new work through an encounter with a new and unfamiliar place.

PH: How do you perceive a place like the Church of the Resurrection – through the ears or also through other senses?

MA: Certainly not through the ears alone. For me, this is about experiencing "intermediate spaces". There is an episode from the Gospel of John that can serve as a metaphor for this, a scene that is said to have happened exactly at the grave we visited. Mary recognises Jesus by his voice and tries to stop him but he says, "Don’t touch me!" And although she doesn’t, there is something going on between the two of them, the lack of contact opens up an intermediate space. From my perspective, this is a vertical space that has nothing to do with chronology, narration or a horizontal concept of time. As a compositional notion I find this very inspiring.

The sound of a plastic bag caught in a bush in the desert and worn down by sand, wind and sun. Spray raised by a storm on Lake Tiberias. Footsteps on stone, in water, on the beach. We spend days on the streets, always recording. Sometimes we follow the travel guide, sometimes we follow our intuition. By the time we get to Ben Gurion airport ten days later, we are exhausted. Joachim is declaring his equipment to customs when Israeli immigration officers pull Mark and me from the queue. They inquire about the reasons for our stay. Mark explains truthfully that we were doing research for his opera project: "We made recordings of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. According to the bible these are water, wind and fire." We raise suspicion.

PH: Many 20th century composers felt encumbered by the picture frame stage – to them, the traditional architecture of opera houses didn’t seem to support new approaches. What do you think about it?

MA: I don’t believe that question is relevant any more. I try to examine the existing spaces and the machinery of the opera and transcend it. I look for meta-spaces. I don’t feel that I’m engaged in an aesthetic and historical reflection about the nature of music theatre. With my music, I aim for another kind of force, of temporal experience and presence. The aesthetic situation on stage is just another result of this continuous search for new spaces.

So far, Mark has often incorporated deliberately cryptic references to the bible in his works – fragments, single words, or even individual letters. Here, text serves as a code and trigger for a most fragile sort of music that draws all its power from its instability, its presence from its ephemeral qualities. In its canonical structures, this music seems to express something of the eternal order in nature, and by way of rigorous spectral analysis of sounds, it cuts through to the essence of listening. Finally, this music, through its finely nuanced sounds and multi-faceted timbres, seems to capture the multitude of relations that occur between the things in this world and those that lie beyond.

Johannes: One earwitness is worth more than ten eyewitnesses when it comes to recognising people who are devoted to wisdom.

Johannes Reuchlin has been on Mark Andre’s mind since the Oper Stuttgart commissioned the opera. He has since asked himself, "How would Reuchlin react to the world of today? What would it be like for him to travel to Israel?" Mark’s interest in Johannes Reuchlin was sparked when, in 2007, Sergio Morabito, now chief dramaturge of the Oper Stuttgart, drew on Mark’s chamber music to create a "scenic collage" about the life of the first German humanist, who was born in Pforzheim in 1455 and died in Stuttgart in 1522. It was Johann Wolfgang Goethe who later described the legal scholar and scribe as a "Wunderzeichen" (miraculous sign). What might indeed strike one as a miracle is that Reuchlin, despite many attacks, always stood by his belief that a command of Hebrew and the study of Jewish literature was essential for the development of one’s intellectual abilities. Reuchlin took a special interest in Kabbalah, the mystical tradition which seeks, by various techniques and teachings, to expose the hidden meaning of the Holy Scripture and, through that, to reveal as well as influence the divine order. His opposition towards the destruction of Jewish books by the Catholic Church was met with hostility and even resulted in a defeat in the papal court that severely damaged his career.

The black and white prints of the data that we collected in Israel, the encoded aura of the places and sounds we visited are now spread over the piano in Mark’s study in Berlin-Friedrichshain. In January 2013, the first choir rehearsal for took place. The passing on of Mark Andre’s compositional spaces is well underway.

2/3/2014, 19:00 (World Premiere) with further performances on 7, 16, 22 and 25/3/2014
Oper Stuttgart

Read more about this project on Oper Stuttgart's blog (in German): https://operstuttgart.wordpress.com/category/wunderzaichen/

Patrick Hahn, 12/2013 | Translation: KWMM

With special thanks to Oper Stuttgart

Elsewhere? Maya Beiser’s Cello Opera

Mount Sodom, in the Judean desert, is made up entirely of halite, or rock salt. It continues to rise up out of the earth, as it has been doing for hundreds of thousands of year. As the heat, water, ice and pressure of the Earth's atmosphere work to break down Mount Sodom's rocks, portions separate and break away. One of these pillars is said to be Lot's wife, the Biblical figure who defied God's orders not to look back at her home, the city of Sodom, as it went up in flames. Maya Beiser was driving through the Judean desert when she saw the rock formation said to be Lot's wife, eternally suffering her punishment, frozen as a pillar of salt.

Beiser says that it was at this moment that she became inspired to depict the story of Lot's wife. She wanted to make her the counterpart to the protagonist in the poem of the Belgian surrealist Henri Michaux, I Am Writing To You from a Far-Off Country, which tells the story of a woman living in a world on the brink of destruction. Eve Beglarian composed a piece for Beiser with the same name, and she wanted to incorporate the work into her latest project as well, a cello opera entitled that she was developing with theatre director Robert Woodruff.

"is a culmination, for me, of a lot of the work that I've done to try and bring music and visuals and text and projection together, and to make a coherent message," Beiser said recently in a telephone interview. "So it's an expansion of the concert experience where still the music is the strong force, but there are all these other elements as well. And really, is an expansion of this piece that I've done ."

is her most ambitious project to date. Joining her on the project are the theatre director Robert Woodruff, choreographer Brook Notary and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. Eve Beglarian, Michael Gordon, and Missy Mazzoli composed the music. The vocalist Helga Davis and a team of four dancers appear with Maya Beiser on stage.

Beiser and Woodruff spent a year in libraries, reading everything that Michaux ever wrote. In Beglarian's composition, "there is this whole universe that comes out of the cello," Maya says, and she wanted Robert Woodruff to help her make this into a complete theatrical event. "[The text] is enigmatic, so it felt to me like it was important to really give an interpretation of the text with the visuals and with the theatrical elements." After reading the texts, they set their goal on depicting a "community of women who are facing death, facing the end of the world, and how they react to this catastrophe."

While the first half of includes , as well as by Michael Gordon, the second half is inspired by the story of Lot's wife, for which Missy Mazzoli has composed the work .

Both stories, of the woman in Michaux's poem and of Lot's wife, are stories about women, but both were created by men. These characters are nameless women in a male-dominated world. Beiser's team, full of talented, creative, and successful women, is inspiring and reflects the strides women have made in recent history, while the themes dealt with here remind us of how much work is still left to be done.

I saw in [Michaux's text]...women all over the world who are facing catastrophe. It's not so much the apocalypse as I'm seeing people just facing really terrible situations in life and oppression...this text presents such an amazing opportunity to speak about all those things. The idea that I'm calling it [is] somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because you can say that those things don't happen here, they probably happen elsewhere - we think of it being somewhere else, but it's really here.”

Ultimately, however, Maya Beiser says what is so great about the piece is the music itself, and the journey that the cello takes throughout the performance. "[We] take the cello from being this pure, western classical icon acoustic instrument through this whole piece, [and] there is an evolution that happens, and in fact, at the end, I'm finding this electric cello in the sand. So I'm going to be playing different instruments throughout the piece. There are a lot of different sounds that will occur from the beautiful acoustic sound that we have come to associate with the cello, to really processed sound, to different ways that we can approach the cello today in the 21st century."

Although Beiser refers to as an opera, it has also been her goal to make a piece that was compact enough to take on tour. "Usually, when you do a production like that," she says, "you have weeks if not months in a particular space where you build it and you have everything at your disposal. So it was difficult to do something movable and tour-able and not so big that no one will ever be able to afford it.”

In November 2011, Beiser, the choreographer and the project's four dancers met for a workshop at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center to work out the pieces choreography. In April 2012, the team took up residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City to develop . "[Erin Cassida Wilson] created the text for the story and she's really depicting a woman, a modern woman," says Beiser. "So there is this sense of ancient and modern that happens together in that piece. So it's kind of bringing it more to our lives now...I don't want to give away too much of the story. The impact is really there when you are experiencing it, when you hear it and see it and are immersed in the experience."

The world premiere of took place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on 11 October 2012. A series of performances followed at BAM in New York City from 17 to 20 October.

Since then, Maya Beiser has developed two new programmes. Famous for her multimedia projects that bring together composers and video artists, the first is a solo project, , which focuses on videos by Bill Morrison. It received its world premiere at the 2013 Orphans Midwest Film Symposium at Indiana University. The world premiere of a version for cello, drums and bass guitar took place in March 2014 at the Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco. The second, , is a new work by Jaroslaw Kapuscinski for cello and Japanese Shō. It includes 3D projections from the OpenEndedGroup and had its world premiere on 7 December 2013 in Stanford University. Both projects are once again examples of Maya Beiser’s refusal to adhere to the boundaries of the traditional cello recital. On 24 February 2014, she performed David Lang’s in London’s Southbank Centre with the BBC Concert Orchestra under Keith Lockhart. The work, which was written especially for her, received its world premiere in 2010 with the Norrlands Operans Symfoniorkester in Umea.

 

Rachel Kelly, Celia Wynne Willson, 02/2014

 

Dmitry Liss – Setting New Standards in the Urals

"In my opinion, the UPO is one of the best in Russia, which means in Europe as well, as the level of the Russian musicians is very high. (…) One of the main qualities of this orchestra is its unbelievable temperament and ability to stand for each other. This is a very important quality and it greatly impresses me every time." – Vadim Repin

In comparison to the media hype around some Russian conductor colleagues, Dmitry Liss shies away from the limelight – at least offstage. German media such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, or only recently took note of the groundbreaking, excellent cultural work in faraway Yekaterinburg. Indeed, Europe heard little news from this region since Sverdlovsk was the birthplace of the defence and nuclear power industries in Soviet times, and was thus completely cut off from the outside world.

The success story of Dmitry Liss, the Artistic Director of the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra and Alexander Kolotursky, the Director of the Sverdlovsk State Philharmony, which also comprises a choir and a youth orchestra, began in the mid-nineties. Over 18 years, Liss and Kolotursky gradually elevated the UPO to an international level and the Philharmony became a landmark in the city. Today, the orchestra is considered one of the best in Russia. Remarkably, not a single orchestra musician was laid off in the process. Liss rather attempted to bring everyone on board and to change the overall attitude. "Everything has changed since then," says Liss in a conversation with the magazine Das Orchester. "Most of all, the self-confidence of the orchestra, its attitude. When I came, the musicians were very introverted, even frustrated. At the same time, the orchestra has existed for more than 70 years and is one of the oldest Russian ensembles. Even 18 years ago, it had an excellent reputation. But among Russian musicians! Abroad, it was unknown and it didn’t play a role in the city."

Just how professionally the Philharmony in Yekaterinburg works and how forward-thinking it is, is documented in the extensive pedagogical work and an association of friends with 24,000 members, but most significantly by the interconnectedness with even the smallest village in the Sverdlovsk region. Each concert which Dmitry Liss conducts at the Philharmony is broadcast via broadband internet connection to more than twenty cultural centres and libraries in the entire region.

As the only external orchestra with its own series at the Mariinsky Theatre, the UPO’s artistic standing is widely acknowledged in Russia. Beyond Russia, the distinguished and cosmopolitan chief conductor Dmitry Liss and his orchestra also enjoy an excellent reputation. He regularly leads the UPO at the Folles Journées (also in 2014 in Nantes with a focus on American music, concert.arte.tv ) and at the Salle Pleyel. Their first guest performance at the Beethovenfest Bonn in September 2013 generated enthusiastic applause and standing ovations. Dmitry Liss has recently worked with the Orchestre National de Paris, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, Residentie Orkest, the Hungarian National Philharmonic and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, amongst others.

His commitment to lesser-known and modern Russian repertoire is an integral part of Dmitry Liss’ profile, for instance the oeuvre of Nikolai Miaskovsky, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov’s and companion of Prokofiev’s, whose symphonies he regularly includes in his programmes. In addition, Liss has recorded works by Avet Terteryan and Galina Ustvolskaya with the Ural Philharmoic Orchestra. His open and self-assured stance is met with great approval by soloists such as Boris Berezovsky, Vadim Repin and Denis Matsuev.

"The UPO is astonishingly flexible and can perform any program.(…) This Orchestra has its own style, its own taste and, I would say, its own musical texture as its strings are simply unique. It also demonstrates the highest level of ensemble teamwork when any movement of a soloist is caught by the orchestra and the conductor." – Denis Matsuev
 

KWMM, 02/2014
 

Two New Works from Friedrich Cerha

Admittedly, there is quite an accumulation of engagements in Friedrich Cerha’s concert diary just short of his 88th birthday, but in this instance, this ought not to cause too many logistical problems at least: the two upcoming world premieres will take place approximately 150 km away from each other as the crow flies – less than one and a half hours by train. The Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (hr-Sinfonieorchester) under Andrés Orozco-Estrada (for whom this concert will be his last as principle conductor of the orchestra) will give the world premiere of Tagebuch für Orchester on 6 February. The following day, Drei Orchesterstücke can be heard for the first time in the Kölner Philharmonie, performed by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under the direction of Jukka-Pekka Saraste.

Friedrich Cerha has shaped the music world in his native Austria as much through his compositions as through his work as conductor and co-founder of the ensemble "die reihe" since the late 1950s. It is for this reason that he has long been considered the doyen of New Music in Austria. In the meantime, he was well known abroad for his congenial completion of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. However, international awareness of this great composer has been completely transformed over the last decade with an impressive array of late works. Orchestral works such as Instants (WDR Symphony Orchestra), Like a Tragicomedy (BBC Philharmonic Orchestra) and Kammermusik für Orchester (Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna), solo works including Konzert für Schlagzeug und Orchester (Martin Grubinger, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg) and his opera Der Präsident, which received its world premiere in 2013 at the Gärtnerplatz Theatre in Munich with the Volksoper Wien, are proof of tremendous creative energy. Cerha’s international success was recognised in 2012 with the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.

In this context, a younger generation of musicians has also discovered his earlier works for themselves. Fellow composers including Johannes Maria Staud have waxed lyrical about the orchestra cycle Spiegel: "What continues to baffle me today is how fresh and unworn, how visionary and exciting this music sounds even fifty years after it was created. The uncompromising and economical way in which it was composed and the innovativeness of its notation and orchestration go hand-in-hand with an unbelievable bounty of sweet and iridescent, coalescent and eruptive, bizarre and unforgettable moments." Elena Mendoza first got to know the piece after listening to the complete recordings on KAIROS. In her enthusiasm for this work, she regretted that she had not discovered it sooner; her development as a composer would surely have taken a different course.

Friedrich Cerha has often commented with his own mild irony on the fact that, at almost 90, he is still adding new works to his oeuvre year after year. On many occasions, audiences at world premieres of his works must have wondered whether they were hearing his last great work. Orchesterstücke offer yet another chance to do so as Cerha makes explicit reference to the circle of life. On the origin of the work, he explains, "in 2006 when I was 80; an age in which one feels compelled to reflect on things, how the world has changed during one’s lifetime, how the world has changed one as a person and how one sees the world differently during the course of one’s life. I was imagining three pieces for orchestra, which would be connected to these thoughts."

The point of departure was the Berceuse céleste, which was premiered by the RSO Stuttgart under Eliahu Inbal in 2008. He defines this first of the three orchestra pieces as "free from the oppressing pull of gravity; it has a somewhat childish naivety to it, a being in which all experiences are just beginning, which does not yet pass judgment, which does not think in terms of values." Between this lullaby and the piece entitled Tombeau, which deals with the transition to death, is a piece full of emotion, fractures, convulsions, which Cerha labelled "despite its length, slightly tongue-in-cheek, Intermezzo."

Those who get the opportunity to attend both world premieres will hear in Tagebuch a work that bears a family resemblance of sorts to Orchesterstücken that originated shortly after the latter was completed. Friedrich Cerha describes these short pieces as "transparent in setting and easily comprehended," in which he has developed several musical situations from Drei Orchesterstücken further. "The composition is called Tagebuch because almost every piece was written in one day," he said.

Both world premieres will be broadcast on the radio and Tagebuch can be watched via live-stream on Arte Live Web on 7 February.

The next world premiere can be heard in October when the SWR Symphony Orchestra will perform Cerha’s orchestral work Nacht.

Nina Rohlfs, 01/2013 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson
 

Darkness & Light: Pulsation of contrasts

Without light, there would be no darkness, without darkness there would be no light. This dualism illustrates the pulse of life itself completely and has inspired a vast number of works throughout cultural history. The organist Bernard Foccroulle, who is also well-known around the world as a composer and director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, works with artists from a wide range of different fields. Together with the video artist Lynette Wallworth, he captures the roll of light and darkness in music and nature.

Light and Darkness, a work for organ composed by Sofia Gubaidulina, acts as an opening and thematic inspiration for the programme, which consists of a combination of baroque music (Buxtehude) and twentieth century music (Messiaen and Hosokawa, among others). These works lead the listener right into the centre of this contrast, which is deeply anchored in the theological thinking of the baroque era and has characterised organ literature over the centuries through numerous motifs and trends.

Lynette Wallworth on her inspiration for this project:

In conceiving my work for Darkness and Light, I am interested in the use of particular repetitions of geometric imagery in cave art that has been speculated as emerging out of trance. This is thought by some ethno-anthropologists to be the very origins of visual art itself. This intensity of darkness and the effects it can induce in the resulting imagery is what I will explore in Darkness and Light. This seems to blend beautifully with the program of pieces selected by Bernard to be presented in churches, cathedrals and concert halls, where the notion of transcendence was/is at the heart of the structure. I am interested in creating imagery to heighten the sense of the music and the ability to lose one's self in it, and to use the intensity of darkness and a reflection of entopic imagery to generate a new set of images for contemplation.

The conceptual pair Darkness and Light can also stand for the dichotomy of day and night, vitality and destruction, happiness and terror. In the context of Gubaidulina’s life and work, for example, light and darkness can be interpreted as hope and despair under a totalitarian regime.

Lynette Wallworth’s video art manages to easily build on these aspects and adds another facet: in her work which is closely connected with the cycles of nature, the Australian explores light as well as the influence that darkness has on human experience. Her contemporary visions, which accompany the music, merge with the sound experience and invite the audience to rediscover the interplay of contrasts as something worth treasuring. Thus, in Darkness and Light, Lynette Wallworth and Bernard Foccroulle warn against the destruction of nature, which determines the rhythm of every life.

Concert dates:
17 March 2014: Cathédrale Saint Michel et Sainte Gudule , Brussels
11 April 2014: , London
22 April 2014: , Église Saint-Jean-de-Malte, Aix-en-Provence
29 September 2014: Philharmonie Luxemburg

Nina Rohlfs, 04/2012 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson

Orchestral Chamber Music

Antje Weithaas is used to leading concerts from the concertmaster’s desk. Following two years as artist in residence with the Kammerakademie Potsdam, she has held the post of artistic director of the Camerata Bern, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012, since 2009.

Leading an experienced ensemble with a long tradition is a welcome challenge, she explains. Although the repertoire of the Camerata, which consists of 14 core string players, may be predominantly new for the violinist who is highly sought-after worldwide as a soloist with large orchestras and chamber musicians, the style of working is not. "I take an awful lot from my chamber music experiences into my work with the Camerata," says Antje Weithaas, who enjoys great success with her Arcanto Quartet and partners such as Lars Vogt, Christian Tetzlaff and Silke Avenhaus. She adds that in a chamber music context, the personal responsibility and creativity of each individual is required. On the parallels between her different fields of work, she says, "Whatever the ensemble, my ideal of playing music together consists of listening to one another, evolving together and communicating with one another."

However, practice plays an important role before this musical experience can happen; something she recently described in The Strad classical music magazine as an exploration of the emotional content of each note in the overall structure. That may seem obvious, but the violinist, who also holds a professorship at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin, stresses the importance of having a personal understanding of each work. Without this, an interpretational concept of "sound, phrasing, articulation and rhetoric" remains uninspired. Antje Weithaas summarises her role in a large chamber ensemble thus; "body language, a strong vision, suggestions from my side, personal responsibility from each individual."

Camerata Bern’s anniversary season was an exciting one: alongside a stimulating concert programme, a CD of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata arranged for strings and his String Quartet No. 11 in F minor op. 95, arranged by Mahler was recorded. The addition of wind and further string instruments extended the repertoire possibilities, allowing the Camerata to push the boundaries of its repertoire, for instance by including Beethoven’s symphonies in its programme. "With our chamber music roots, we are able to achieve a stronger transparency than with a larger instrumentation. Many listeners reported that they were able to discern details in the score which they had previously missed," explains Antje Weithaas.

Another feature of the 50th anniversary season were the encores: 20 composers of contemporary music wrote short works especially for the ensemble, adding a very personal touch to mark Camerata Bern’s long tradition of high class music-making.

Nina Rohlfs, 01/2014 | Translation: Celia Wynne Willson