Festival Música Viva 2008
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www.fbbva.es www.neos‐music.com COLLECTION FUNDACIÓN BBVA ‐ NEOS Festival Música Viva 2008 Karlheinz Stockhausen Mixtur 2003 for 5 orchestra groups, 4 sine‐wave generator players, 4 sound mixers, with 4 ring modulators and sound projectionist [2003] Mixtur marks the beginning of live‐electronic orchestral music. Of major import is the transformation of the familiar orchestral sound into a new and magical soundworld. Mixtur 2003 can be performed in two discrete versions: a forwards one and a retrograde one. The form is a ‘moment form’: twenty musical moments acquire an understanding of changing transformations in the five orchestra groups. Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in 1928 in Mödrath, and studied Music Education, German Laguage and Literature, Philosophy and Musicology in Cologne. In 1963 he became the Director of the Cologne Studio for Electronic Music. From 1977 to 2004 he composed, among many other works, the music drama cycle Licht, one that is regarded as a major work. He died in December 2007, the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. Karl Amadeus Hartmann Symphonie ›L’Œuvre‹ Toccata variata – Adagio [1937/38] The Symphony L’Œuvre was written against the background of an emergent Nazi regime, after the novel by Émile Zola. Not really a symphonic poem, the work centres around a protagonist that Hartmann readily identifies with, like the main role in the book. Until the time of the German premiere at the musica viva festival, there had been only two other performances, in 1939, in Lüttich and Brussels. The Adagio was used by the composer for his Sixth Symphony, dating from 1953. Karl Amadeus Hartmann lived from 1905 to 1963 in Munich. In many of his compositions he raised a voice against the inhumanity and random nature of the Nazi regime. In 1945 he founded the concert series musica viva and did much for the reception of contemporary music. Aribert Reimann Cantus for clarinet and orchestra [2006] Reimann’s Cantus is informed with the spirit of a requiem. Its over‐arching lines begin in the clarinet, emerging out of nothingness, and end by merging into each other. The percussion lends impetus, pointed up by the harp and piano, this serving to sever again and again the clarinet’s immeasurable lyrical line. Some instrumental groups, including the violins and the cellos, are omitted in order that the piece should favour the clarinet.The term ‘Cantus’makes it clear how the human voice can be treated as a kind of song that can be formed, changed and manipulated by the clarinet, which can even augment what remains, an air essentially. The work is dedicated to the composer and clarinettist Jörg Widmann. Aribert Reimann was born in 1936 into a musical family and can count on many important composers among his teachers, including Ernst Pepping and Boris Blacher. Vocal music, 1 especially the Lied and the opera, soon formed the centre of his artistic output. Jörg Widmann Armonica for orchestra [2006] Jörg Widmann’s orchestral work is coloured throughout by the spheric, unreal sound of the glass harmonica that is used at the beginning and the end of the piece. The instrument has an interesting attribute: if too much pressure is used, no sound will emerge, Widmann incorporating this into the composition itself. The music gradually manoeuvres itself into a crescendo and reaches a highpoint where the pressure is too great and the sound practically bursts asunder. After this act of destruction, the final notes – gliding along as they do – and chords sound even more fey. Jörg Widmann is a double talent: an excellent clarinettist and one of the most successful composers of the younger generation. He was born in 1973 in Munich and in 2001, at the age of 28, was made a Professor at the State Conservatory of Music in Freiburg. Matthias Pintscher Hérodiade‐Fragmente Dramatic scene for soprano and orchestra [1999] The work is based on a sketch for the poem Hérodiade by Stéphane Mallarmé. Pintscher uses certain sequences of the dialogue between Hérodiade and her chambermaid, creating new connections in the character of a monologue – it is a kind of ‘scène intermédiaire’. The foreground is tinged by a sense of the operatic and the dramatic,whereby the composer himself maintains: “I tried in the music to bring out the textual perspective and not just rely on affect or the purely illustrative.” Matthias Pintscher The composer’s declared aim is to write music that goes against the rub of jaded postmodernism. Matthias Pintscher was born in 1971 in Marl [North Rhine Westphalia] and is today one of the most important and successful composers of his generation. He trained initially as a pianist, percussionist, violinist and conductor, before turning his hand to composition under Giselher Klebe and Manfred Trojahn Iannis Xenakis Antikhthon for orchestra [1971] Antikhthon was commissioned in 1971 by the choreographer George Balanchine and conceived as a ballet. Xenakis chose an abstract approach taken from the philosophy of classical Greece. According to the composer, “I took a Pythagorean term [antikhthon = antiearth] from the fifth and sixth centuries BC. The Pythagoreans were the first to suppose that the earth was not at the centre of the universe.” And this is how Antikhthon should be heard: an image of the universe in sonic terms, where, moreover, its Ptolemaic centre has been lost but which has taken on infinite size. Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 as the son of Greek parents in Braila [Romania].For twelve years he was the assistant to the architect Le Corbusier before becoming, simultaneously, a composition student of Olivier Messiaen. His works are landmarks of music history. Xenakis died in 2001 in Paris. James Dillon La navette for orchestra [2001] The title makes use of the French word navette [shuttle, rapeseed] and relates the myth of Philomele and Tereus. Dillon’s music lives from the contrast of opposites and interstitial aesthetics that seek to combine seemingly diametrically opposed stylistic elements. The manner in which various instrumental groups and combinations are treated plays a key role in 2 his orchestral compositions. James Dillon Born in Glasgow in 1950, James Dillon is an autodidact as a composer. He later studied Music, Linguistics and Acoustics in London and explored extensively Indian classical music and its concomitant rhythmic subtleties. Beat Furrer Concerto for Piano and Orchestra[2007] “What especially interests me are situations that act as bridges”, comments the composer about her own music, adding: “Where does one array merge into another.Where are the borders of an individual phenomenon?” In the present work, too, single gestures peel off monochromatic surfaces that seem to stand still and which, when they do become focussed, turn into scampering figures as if shadows were chasing each other. Furrer allocates the piano part not only a solo role, but allies it to an orchestral voice cast in umbrage, calling upon the soloist to address this shadowy echo. Beat Furrer The composer Beat Furrer was born in 1954 in Schaffhausen [Switzerland] and studied Composition and Conducting in Vienna with Roman Haubenstock‐Ramati and Otmar Suitner respectively.Today she is not only Artistic Director of Klangforum Wien but also a Professor of Composition in Graz. Giacinto Scelsi Uaxuctum for seven percussionists, timpanist, chorus and orchestra [1966] In sonic terms, this is an exorbitant choral and orchestral work. Cast in five movements and dating from 1966, it is based on the legend of the Maya city Uaxuctum,which was destroyed by its inhabitants for religious reasons. Scelsi’s music attempts to breathe the air left behind by this mysterious place. The choral writing is technically extremely testing and admits multi‐ layered surfaces, trills, microtonal intervals, laryngeal effects and breathy sounds. The result is an artificial soundscape that seems to emerge from the netherworld. Giacinto Scelsi Conte d’Ayala Valva was born in 1905 in La Spezia as the son of a wealthy aristocratic family. Although he maintained close contacts with the group of composers ‘Nuova Consonanza’, he remained a recluse.He died in 1988 in Rome. His work has achieved much attention and critical respect, mostly in German‐speaking countries. Chaya Czernowin Pilgerfahrten Pilgerfahrten for speaker, treble choir, and instruments after texts by Tove Jansson and Stefan George[2006/2007] The composition Pilgerfahrten [Pilgramages] is a virtual and abstract piece of sonic theatre, one which is fed by the meeting of two discrete texts. And if the texts are quite disparate, this gives rise to many readily audible, shared overtones. At the centre there remains the strange phenomenon of group identity, one in which each individual can be subsumed and extinguished. Chaya Czernowin The composer Chaya Czernowin was born in Haifa in 1957 as the daughter of Holocaust survivors and grew up in Israel. Since the age of 25 she has lived in Germany, Japan and the USA. Kaija Saariaho Vent nocturne for viola and electronics [2006] The idea behind Vent nocturne [Night wind] is the bilingual edition of the poems of Georg Trakl. The synchronicity of the two languages allows the composer to point up the relationship 3 between the viola and the electronics. The work is in two parts: Sombres miroirs [Dark mirrors] and Soupirs de l’obscur [Breaths of the obscure]. For the composer, it is the sound of the viola that represents breathing, a phenomenon that also plays a key role in the electronic part. Kaija Saariaho was born in 1952 in Helsinki and studied at the Sibelius Academy and later with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. Her career was also shaped at IRCAM in Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Liza Lim Ochred String for oboe, viola, violoncello and double bass [2007] The work takes its name from two substances used within the traditional culture of the Aborigines.