Work of the week

 

Andrew Norman rounds out a busy year with the world premiere of his new piano concerto Split on 10 December 2015 with the New York Philharmonic. The work was written especially for virtuoso pianist Jeffrey Kahane, who will perform the premiere at David Geffen Hall under the baton of James Gaffigan.

The new concerto marks his sophomore effort of works for piano and orchestra, following the successful premiere of Suspend in May of 2014 with Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic and pianist Emanuel Ax. Split is a 25-minute tour-de-force in one movement. In approaching the piece, Norman was inspired by "the wit, vitality, and expressive character" of Kahane’s playing. It also takes on a mischievous theme between the soloist and orchestra:

I started with the idea of casting Jeffrey as a mercurial trickster, wreaking havoc in and among the various sections of the orchestra, but as the piece progressed he became less the prankster and more the pranked, an unwitting protagonist trapped in a Rube Goldbergian labyrinth of causes and effects who tries, with ever greater desperation, to find his way out of the madness and on to some peaceful plane. – Andrew Norman

Split was composed alongside another large-scale concerto, Switch, for percussion and orchestra, which was hailed as "hyperkinetic" and "an instant hit" (The Salt Lake Tribune) following its premiere last month with Colin Currie and the Utah Symphony Orchestra. Switch receives its UK premiere on 11 December 2015 with Currie joining the BBC Symphony Orchestra at Barbican Hall, conducted by Sakari Oramo.

• Andrew Norman - profile


• Split - work details


• New York Philharmonic


• BBC Symphony Orchestra

photo: © Timothy Andres / photo ed

(12/07/15)

 

Preludes for saxophone quartet, string orchestra and percussion will be premiered at the Brucknerhaus in Linz on 30 November by the The Raschèr Saxophone Quartet with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Bruckner Orchester Linz.

Following from Say’s only other work for saxophone, Suite (2014), Preludes
is in four sections, each inspired by a literary classic: Hermann Hesse’s "Siddhartha", Dostoyevsky’s "White Nights", Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis" and Albert Camus’ "The Outsider".  The composer borrows motifs from these complex emotional worlds and portrays them in the music: Oriental soundscapes — such as the middle-eastern dance rhythms in "The Outsider", first appearing in the percussion and then adopted by the saxophone quartet — give the piece an exotic flavour.

All my compositions, as indeed my life does, take place between Eastern and Western musical lineages. Turkish music has a stronger rhythmical character, German music has a great history. Both cultures interact with each other. – Fazıl Say

The programme is repeated at the Vienna Musikverein on 1 December 2015 and the composer joins the orchestra for both concerts as soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major, KV 414.

• Fazıl Say - profile


• Preludes - work details


• Bruckner Orchester Linz

photo: © Marco Borggreve

 

The Cleveland Orchestra performs the world premiere of Bernard Rands's Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra on 27 November 2015 with soloist Robert Walters. Lionel Bringuier leads the premiere, which takes place at Severance Hall. Rands's Concerto was commissioned by the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music for Robert Walters and The Cleveland Orchestra. Walters has taught English horn at Oberlin since 2006 and has been solo English horn with The Cleveland Orchestra since 2004.

Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra is a three movement work with titles suggesting their character and form: Fantasia, Aubade, and Hommage. The third and final movement is a tribute to Debussy whose music has had a strong influence on Rands throughout his career. Debussy's "Jeux" is a notable subtext to this movement.

Though no quotations from Debussy's music are used, the spirit of "Jeux" is evoked – sometimes quite overtly and at other times rather mysteriously. – Bernard Rands

Debussy's "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" and Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique" accompany Rands's Concerto on the program. Subsequent performances take place on 28 and 29 November 2015.

Bernard Rands - profile
Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra - information
The Cleveland Orchestra

 

On 20 November 2015, Ensemble PHACE will give the world premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s Knights of the strange at the Wien Modern festival. Guitarist Yaron Deutsch and accordionist Krassimir Sterev will join the ensemble for the performance, conducted by Simeon Pironkoff at the Konzerthaus in Vienna.

The title Knights of the strange comes from a book written by Czernowin’s son, Ko, when he was four. The book consists mainly of quotations from situations in everyday domestic life, and the work plays on these asking the performers to include spoken references to their own children or parents. Within the ensemble piece is a duo for electric guitar and accordion, which also exists as an autonomous work with the same title. Thus these two instruments somehow form a musical symbiosis with the other instruments of the ensemble.

Knights of the strange is a piece of music poetry. Where a few words highlight the speculative and poetic connections between dreams, reality and reflection. The duo is like an independent plant from another climate inside the jungle of the tutti version. It is a very close look at how impulse and reaction, when faced with some random element, can take quite a surprising turn into an unexpected territory. – Chaya Czernowin

The duo version of Knights of the strange was premiered in summer 2015 at a portrait concert at Gare du Nord, Basel. In March 2016, as part of the Green Umbrella Festival, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla will conduct the LA Phil New Music Group in the American premiere of the ensemble version at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles.

• Chaya Czernowin - profile


• Knights of the strange - work details


• Chaya Czernowin - website


• Wien Modern


• PHACE - contemporary music

An educational project, the "Gershwin Experiment", run by German local broadcasting companies has enabled school pupils to learn about the music of composer György Ligeti. In the project's final concerts on 12 and 13 November at Munich's Herkulessaal, students can hear the fourth movement of Ligeti's Concert Românesc, performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons. The performance will also be broadcast live on German television and radio.

Although Concert Românesc was written in 1951, it was twenty years before it received its first public performance: a harmonically atypical passage caused an argument during an early Budapest rehearsal leading to the censorship of the work. Today, however, the piece can be heard in concert halls all over the world. Written for orchestra with string and woodwind solos, the four-movement work uses elements from the Romanian folk tradition. Ligeti thus follows in the footsteps of Béla Bartók, taking particular inspiration from his studies at the Institute of Folklore, Bucharest.

I grew up in the Hungarian-language area in Transylvania. The official language was Romanian, but I only learned this language later at secondary school. This is why the Romanian language seemed mysterious to me when I was a child. Already as a three-year-old I had my first encounters with the Romanian folklore: The alpine horn had a completely different sound than "normal" music. Today I know why: because the alpine horn only produces natural tones, the fifth and seventh partials - the major third and the minor seventh - sound "wrong", flatter than for instance on the piano. This wrong sound - which is actually the right one, as it corresponds to acoustic purity - is what is so wonderful about the sound of the horn. - György Ligeti

Further performances of Concert Românesc this month include those by the Royal Concertgebouw and Gustavo Gimeno during their tour to Japan and Taiwan this November: on the 9th at the Aichi Prefectural Art Theatre, Nagoya, and on the 13th at Tokyo's Suntory Hall. The MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra will also include the piece in a concert series exclusively for schools this month: on 6 November at the Lucas Cranach Gymnasium in Wittenberg, on 9 November at the Domgymnasium in Merseburg and on 26 November at the Kulturhaus, Reinsdorf.

• Concert Românesc - information


• György Ligeti - profile

photo: © Wikimedia Commons / Stbichler (Alt, Porumbacu de Jos)

 

On November 2015, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra will present the world premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's Nach dem Sturm ("After the Tempest"), coinciding with both the orchestra’s 50th anniversary and the composer’s 60th birthday. Kazushi Ono will conduct at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, with Susanne Elmark and Ilse Eerens singing the two soprano roles.

Hosokawa’s earlier Neben dem Fluss ("Next to the River") for harp and his trumpet concerto Im Nebel ("In the Mist") took their inspiration from poems by Hermann Hesse, but Nach dem Sturm is the first work in which the composer has set Hesse’s words directly to music. The text in question is "Blumen nach einem Unwetter" ("Flowers after a Storm"), for which Hesse painted an accompanying watercolour. Hosokawa uses the poem for the second part of the 20-minute work; this is preceded by a violent storm, using the full force of a large orchestra and an extensive battery of Japanese percussion. Nach dem Sturm is one of several of works that Hosokawa has written in response to the devastating Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. He explains:

For me, musical expression used to be a method to find harmony between human and nature; however, since the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, I began to reconsider the role of music. Music is a type of Shamanism; people pray by music, and calm the spirit of the deceased, creating a bridge between this world and afterlife. The two sopranos represent Mikos [shrine maidens] in this piece. The first half of the music is an expression of a storm using only the orchestra. In the second half, the two sopranos sing Hermann Hesse’s poem, a depiction of a flower gradually finding light again in the aftermath of a storm. - Toshio Hosokawa

Later this month, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra will tour Europe, bringing Nach dem Sturm to Luxembourg on 17 November and Berlin on 19 November.

• Toshio Hosokawa - profile


• Nach dem Sturm - information


• Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra

 

The soloist holds his instrument to his ear, plucks with his left hand and grimaces. He has had to detune his viola… On 28 October 2015, Jörg Widmann’s Viola Concerto will be premiered at the Philharmonie de Paris. The piece was written for Antoine Tamestit, a frequent collaborator of Widmann's, who will perform the piece with the Orchestre de Paris conducted by Paavo Järvi.

Tamestit asserts that the audience can expect ‘a unique concerto experience’ with Widmann's Viola Concerto, where the tradition of the solo concerto genre is tested with characteristic refinement. The work begins without a cue from the conductor — the soloist just starts playing, and without the bow. Inventive playing techniques demonstrate the instrument’s versatility: the imitation of a sitar using a ‘trembling’ vibrato, or percussive use of the viola’s body whilst playing with the other hand. Throughout the piece, the soloist must behave like an actor following detailed stage directions, with a mixture of pride and self-irony. Widmann’s inventiveness is not limited to the solo part; for instance, a scotch glass is used to prepare the piano.

To me, the viola has always been first and foremost an extraordinarily melodious instrument. Playing chamber music with viola is one of the best experiences for me as a musician. Even with the viola’s C-string alone, you can tell stories unimaginable on any other string instrument. In my Viola Concerto, the setting is transported for long periods to a utopian land: at the beginning to a foreign and tentative sphere, inhabited only by viola pizzicati of all possible and impossible variants; then a wistful song from an imaginary oriental fairytale world; finally a crash into artistic-absurd cascades of virtuosity introducing the heart of the piece, an aria for viola and extremely muted strings; a painfully intimate swan song in a submerged world that will only be pulled into a dazzling reality in the final bars. – Jörg Widmann

Widmann’s concerto is a co-commission from the Orchestre de Paris, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Subsequent performances will take place on 26 and 27 November 2015 at the Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, and on 3 and 4 March 2016 at the Herkulessaal, Munich.

• Jörg Widmann - composer profile


• Viola Concerto: details and online score


• Discover more on the website of the Orchestre de Paris

A new staging of Hans Werner Henze’s music drama The Bassarids opens in its original English language version on 23 October. Rossen Gergov will conduct the production, directed by Frank Hilbrich, at Mannheim National Theatre. The world premiere took place at the Salzburg Festival in 1966, and half a century on, The Bassarids remains one of the most significant of Henze’s almost 50 stage works.

The libretto for The Bassarids, written by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, is based on Euripides’ Bacchae; it tells the story of Pentheus, the new ruler of Thebes, banning the cult of Dionysus before being unwittingly drawn into the revelry by Dionysus himself, disguised as a stranger. Pentheus is eventually killed by his own mother, who has mistaken him for a wild animal, before Dionysus reveals his true identity and demands adoration from the Thebans for his revenge against the tyrant. The one-act opera’s large instrumentation and sophisticated libretto make The Bassarids an ambitious project. With Dionysus and Pentheus embodying two extremes of human existence, there is great potential for reference to the present day.

Today I consider The Bassarids, which I now understand to a far greater degree and hold much dearer than when I was composing the work, to be my most important music theatre work. It is […] still relevant for us, but specifically addresses questions associated with the years around 1968: what is freedom and what is bondage? What is repression, what is revolt and what is revolution? This is all in fact demonstrated, insinuated and suggested by Euripides. The multiplicity and richness of relationships, the tangible sensual relationships between the ancient civilisation of this Archaic period and our time are captured in Auden’s text; Euripides is transposed into our time in a manner which could not have been better achieved with the best possible stage production of the original Greek play, as we are constantly reminded of our distance from a different, long-gone civilisation. – Hans Werner Henze

The production runs until 10 December with four subsequent performances. In November, a production by Mario Martone will open at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome.

• Hans Werner Henze - profile


• The Bassarids - information


• Nationaltheater Mannheim

Photo: © Het Muziektheater Amsterdam / photo ed

The Meiningen Court Orchestra (Meininger Hofkapelle) celebrates its 325th anniversary this year. It was with this orchestra in central Germany that Richard Strauss got his first job as a conductor at the age of 19. As a part of the anniversary celebrations, Strauss' last opera Capriccio will open on 16 October in a new production by Anthony Pilavachi, conducted by Philippe Bach.

Many composers have written operas with music itself as a central theme: The Magic Flute, The Mastersingers of Nuremburg, Il trovatore (The Troubadour), and countless operas about Orpheus... In Capriccio, Strauss too puts ‘music’ into the music. Already in the overture, a string sextet performs a birthday piece (which later became one of Strauss’ most popular chamber pieces) for the Countess Madeleine. Set around 1775 in a castle near Paris, the opera tells of the dispute between the supporters of composers Christoph Willibald Gluck and Niccolò Piccini about stylistic changes in opera traditions at the time. Parallel to this conflict on aesthetics is a battle to win the favour of the Countess, with much petty jealousy and many an affair!

Work on Capriccio began in 1939, a time of war. The world was changing its face forever, with Strauss himself becoming embroiled in the National Socialist system; he restricted the opera to one act to save time. With this in mind, some scenes in Capriccio can be seen as a masked confession of the composer’s guilt, as in this dialogue between the Countess and Count from the second tableau:

Countess: Rameau is a genius..., but mannerless and crude is his nature. When I think of this, I thoroughly dislike him.  It dulls my pleasure.
Count: You must separate the man from his work.

The complex network of tensions within the opera and surrounding its creation and reception presents a particular challenge to any director. The much anticipated production at Theater Meiningen, the first new production in six years, runs until 27 June 2016 with ten performances.

• Richard Strauss - profile


• Capriccio - information


• Südthüringisches Staatstheater Meiningen

Photo: © Das Meininger Theater / foto ed

• Richard Ayres - profile


• No. 48 (night studio) - information


• BBC Symphony Orchestra

(10/05/15)