European Premiere of Joseph Schwantner's Rhiannon's Blackbirds by Holst Sinfonietta

November 27 marks the Holst Sinfonietta’s European debut of Joseph Schwantner’s Rhiannon’s Blackbirds in the Flügelsaal des Pianohaus Lepthien in Freiburg. The Holst Sinfonietta has long supported Schwantner’s work, including their commercial recording of his chamber music on the Naxos label released in 2003.

Scored for pierrot ensemble, Rhiannon’s Blackbirds is based on Rhiannon, the Welsh mythological goddess of earth and fertility whose three magical blackbirds, through their hypnotic song, facilitate and symbolize passage to the Otherworld.  Schwantner writes of his work:

As a moto perpetuo, the music inhabits an evolving world of color, sonority and line, linked to an unrelenting web of rapid articulations that help to advance the work’s momentum. The use of palindrome is employed as a formal device within the large-scale arch like design where the ordering of extended sections frequently reverse at their midpoint. Throughout, a series of repetitive phrases gradually unfold, sometimes transparent other times dense, framed by shifting meters where dynamics, register, harmony and texture fluidly evolve and develop.

Completed in 2006 with the support of the Chamber Music America Commissioning Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Rhiannon’s Blackbirds was written for the ensemble eighth blackbird who premiered the work at the Modlin Center for the Arts at University of Richmond in 2006. The Holst Sinfonietta’s November concert, titled “Sounding Spaces,” under the musical direction of Klaus Simon, celebrates exclusively American pieces of the 20th and 21st centuries, including works by Steven Mackey, Joseph Schwantner, Frederic Rzewski, and Jennifer Higdon. Rhiannon’s Blackbirds has a follow up European performance on February 22, 2011 in Zaragoza, Spain, marking its Spanish premiere.

Joseph Schwantner Composer Profile.

Additional information on the Holst Sinfonietta can be found at www.holst-sinfonietta.de.

Joseph Schwantner
Rhiannon’s Blackbirds (2006)
for chamber ensemble
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16’