Brooklyn Academy of Music 1997 Next Wave Festival .-.•- • - • Julio Galan, Rado, 1996, oil on canvas, 39 W' x 31 '/2" Tan~o PHILIP MORRIS BAM 1997 Next Wave Festival is sponsored by COM PAN IE SIN c. Brooklyn Academy of Music Bruce C. Ratner Chairman of the Board Harvey Lichtenstein President & Executive Producer presents Running time: approximately ninety minutes. II There will be no intermission. BAM Majestic Theater Saturday, October 4, 1997 at 7:30pm Sunday, October 5 at 3pm Violin-Gidon Kremer Piano-Vadim Sakharov Bass-Alois Posch Bandoneon-Per Arne Glorvigen Tante aile Primi Hora Cero Milonga in RE Va rdarito L'Histoire de tango Soledad Etude(s) for Solo Violin Le Grand Tango Decarissimo Michelangelo Program is subject to change. Please refer to insert for updated information. Opening night is sponsored by Nonesuch Records. Gidon Kremer on The first time I heard Astor's playing it was striking. There were these very Astor Piazzolla strong vibes of energy. This energy had an incredible power. It's something you never forget, once being in the feel of this energy-it amplifies your own energy, it gives you sheer pleasure of being, encourages you to try more than you already have tried. Astor Piazzolla is not ashamed occasionally to be direct, occasionally to be straightforward. He's not ashamed of being sentimental, and some sophisticated, snobby people would object to it, but I feel like I'm going for the right thing-for the thing that touches you. Falling in love with Piazzolla is something special to me. Falling in love is always special, but falling in love with music is something even more special. It enchants you to do something that you've never done, it gives you the possibility of exploring an area of contemporary music which reaches pecple. For me it's very substantial that music should be felt and not just understood. What interests me the most in music, in dance, in literature, or in cinema, is not necessarily how it is done, but why it is done-why something was written, why something was shot, printed or composed, and in Astor's music, I feel there's always, besides the sensuality, a very deep emotion-why it was done. You can sense through his music an experience of a human being, of a living creature, an experience that makes you at the same time joyful and sad. And saying these two words, joyful and sad, I could say as well that the striking combination of two extreme emotions go together like they go in Franz Schubert's music, in Astor's music. I know very few composers where you can feel it in such a passionate way. And if we talk about beauty, we talk about beautiful buildings, beautiful people, beautiful love relationships, we will also talk about beautiful music, and I feel that Astor's music has all of it, and all of it in a tango. Photo, Franck Fervifle a note by Like Mahler, like Brecht, his soul is vast and imperfect. To paraphrase Neruda, and performing. The joy for us is that Piazzolla's music makes the transition John Adams a poet whose own Latin American soul is so similar in its black depths and to other realizations, to other performers, as it does here in these extraordinary flashes of blinding light, his is a music of the "flawed confusion of human versions by Gidon Kremer. beings... music worn away as by acid by the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of lilies and of urine, splashed by the variety of what The more time one spends with his music, the more the music's startling we do, legally or illegally. It is a music as impure as old clothes, as a body, little perversities begin to reveal themselves. A loose, spontaneous tango with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, will suddenly engage in a passage of carefully strategized counterpoint that wakefulness, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, brings with it an ambiance of controlled rigor to a music of otherwise boldly idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations... " erotic lyricism. Piazzolla shares with the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos a strong affinity for the sequential harmonic movement of Johann Sebastian Bach. Astor Piazzolla's art came into our Northern Hemisphere consciousness at These harmonic sequences have a sense of inevitability in the way they pull roughly the same time as Neruda, Marquez, Vargas, L1osa, Borges and many inexorably toward the cadence, and it is the core of Piazzolla's art to arrange other startling Latin American literary voices began to penetrate our normally --Dr to postpone-these arrivals in the most wrenchingly bittersweet of ways. insular ways of viewing the world. Their work shocked us with its mixture of It is as much as saying that you have finally arrived home, but home is no brutality, magic, sensuality and humane honesty. The vitality of their expressive longer the same. Your house has been razed, and strangers live in the world, its emotional range, its unblinking vision of the human condition, its neighborhood where you once played as a child. humor in the face of crushing economic and political weights, gave us a shock like a brilliant, life-giving jab of pain. In the musical world alone, the discovery Piazzolla's music is fundamentally a tragic statement. Coming at a time of Piazzolla was like the finding of some exotic and dangerous potency drug, when so much contemporary music has drifted either into irrelevant a drug that could bring with it the double-edged sword of ecstasy and the formalism or else toward a hectic romance with commercialism, these bitterest of remorse. tangos speak to us with the authority of genuine feeling. Their roots lie in Buenos Aires' jumble of colliding cultures: Spanish, German, It is a rare musical mind that can elevate a single small musical form like the Jewish, Native American, Italian. It is a true "multi-culture" yet to be tango into an expressive vehicle of such depth and range. The impression we smoothed out and neutered by self-consciousness. It is a discovery take away from experiencing these tangos is of a complete and indigenous like the best of all discoveries: unexpected, native voice, one whose roots were as innately Buenos Aireian as Tchaikovsky's multi-faceted, volatile, generous. were Muscovite. We then learn with amazement that Piazzolla was far from being the home-grown phenomenon that his persona might suggest, but rather a highly cultured musician, a student of the great French pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger (teacher of Aaron Copland and friend of Stravinsky) and a long-time resident of New York City. Piazzolla was a highly cultured composer of instrumental and theatrical music with a secure grasp of musical theory and possessing the practical technique to realize his ideas. But his music flourished more naturally in the cafes and bars of the urban centers of Argentina than in any concert hall. For him, composing and performing were inextricably woven together. One thinks of Bach and Ellington for models of a creative musician who saw little or no separation between improvising, composing Photoe Joel Meyerowitz Gidon Kremer Gidon Kremer was born in Riga, Latvia. Even as a four year old boy he took Per Arne Glorvigen Per Arne Glorvigen comes from Dovre, Norway. He started playing the guitar violin violin lessons with his father and grandfather, both trained violinists. At seven, bandoneon and accordion at age twelve. In 1987, he graduated from the Norwegian he began his official education at the Riga Music School. The young violinist State Academy of Music obtaining the first prize of the jury for his exam took part in contests in Poland, Rumania and France and, at 16 won the concert. That same year, he moved to Paris where he learned French and first prize of the Republic of Latvia. A few years later he was one of the few earned his living playing in the Paris Metro. In October 1988, Mr. Glorvigen students who was selected to study under David Oistrakh at the Moscow met the Argentinian bandoneon maestro Juan Jose Mosalini and decided to Conservatory. In 1967, Kremer won his first international prize at the Queen dedicate himself to the bandoneon. After two years of studying with Mr. Elizabeth Contest in Brussels. After this triumph, he was honored in Montreal Mosalini at the Ecole Nationale de Musique in GennevillierS/Paris, he began as well as at the Paganini Contest in Genoa and, finally, with first prize at his career as a professional bandoneon player. Since then, he has worked the Tchaikovsky Contest in 1970. with French pop star France Gall, tango singer Amelita Baltar, The Paris Bastille Opera, Ensemble Intercontemporain, The Schoenberg Ensemble of In the more than 25 years of his great career, Gidon Kremer has established Amsterdam and The London Sinfonetta. He has also worked in duo with his reputation as a personality of singular form: he is not only a violinist of clarinet player Gloria Feidman, harpsichord player Elisabeth Chojnacka and high international rank, but also an artist of extraordinary individuality. in duo/quartet with violinist Gidon Kremer visiting festivals in Austria, Poland, Gldon Kremer takes the road less traveled and blazes new trails. He has Germany, Moscow and Finland. He is a member of Tango for 3 which has played with nearly all the great orchestras of the world as well as with leading toured in Argentina and Europe. directors such as Leonard Bernstein, Christoph Eschenbach, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel Vadim Sakharov The pianist Vadim Sakharov had already aroused international interest by and Herbert von Karajan.