French composer Darius Milhaud was born today 125 years ago. Milhaud stood out for his bold, individual style and was active for much of the 20th century, a modernist and a member of Les Six who was much influenced by jazz, polytonality as well as the sounds of Brazil.
The basic idea is succinct: an IN-SCHRIFT [“inscription” or “epigraph”]. This occurs in writing [in Schrift], both musical and writing notational characters, written into the line like adages. The orchestration is darkened, thereby attaining focus. (Wolfgang Rihm)
Daniele Gatti will be conducting Wolfgang Rihm’s IN-SCHRIFT together with Brucker’s Symphony No. 9 on a tour that takes him from the Netherlands to the UK, Switzerland and Germany.
The tour commences on 30 August at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. Follow-up performances take place on 1 September at the BBC Proms in London and on 4 September at the Lucerne Festival, before the tour concludes on 6 September at the Philharmonie in Berlin.
The Lucerne Festival honours Friedrich Cerha with a concert performance of Spiegel I-VII. Composed from 1960-61 and first performed in 1971, the cycle is widely considered as one of the composer’s major works, indeed of post-war Austrian music altogether.
Tonight Matthias Pintscher conducts the Swiss première of Spiegel I-VII with the Orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy.
We talked to Friedrich Cerha about his music:
On 26 August, Zoltán Rácz and the Concerto Budapest present the Hungarian première of Arvo Pärt’s Greater Antiphons at the Arcus Temporum festival in Pannonhalma. Also on the programme: Fratres and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.
Béla Bartók composed his Dance Suite, which would become one of his most frequently-played compositions, in 1923. Although the themes are Bartók’s, they sound like peasant music: Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian and Arabian, commingling in some of the movements.
As Bartók himself pointed out, “The melody of the first theme in the first movement is reminiscent of primitive Arabian folk music, whereas its rhythm sounds East European.” Thus he remained faithful to his guiding idea of confraternisation among peoples.
Tonight François-Xavier Roth and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra will perform the Dance Suite at the Lucerne Festival.
Marcelo Lombardero’s over-the-top production of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny opens tomorrow at the Teatro Colón.
You can watch the trailer here:
Sir Simon Rattle will be conducting Arnold Schönberg’s Gurre-Lieder on 19 August at the Royal Albert Hall.
Schönberg worked on his Gurre-Lieder 1900-1911, a period in which he left the work’s style far behind. For him its completion represented the documentation of a compositional style and spiritual attitude no longer his own. At its 1913 première in the Vienna Musikverein the piece enjoyed overwhelming success; Schönberg’s pupil Webern wrote: What a moment of my life! Unforgettable. The sensation of this tumultuous noise thrills me to the point where I swoon.
Friedrich Cerha’s Drei Sätze [Three Movements] will receive their German première on 20 and 21 August at the OsnabrückHalle. Andreas Hotz conducts the Osnabrücker Symphonieorchester.
Friedrich Cerha on Drei Sätze:
The vitality of the first piece depends on contiguity, the interplay of rhythmised layers. The cor anglais and the flute, deployed in soloistic contemplation, dominate the second movement; initially, the orchestra has mere interjections and short interludes, gaining its own character only in the final section and ending with pianissimo string chords. The third piece is lively concertante, with one rather sombre episode in the middle. It requires a plenitude of virtuosity form the orchestra.
Open Spaces has connections with the music of the American composer James Tenney, who died in 2006, and whose musical thinking and radical compositions have exercised a strong influence on my work. In Open Spaces I make use of Tenney’s technique of freely ‘wandering’ between the notes of an overtone chord, as well as the slow glissando in a gentle tremolo from his solo violin piece KOAN. (Georg Friedrich Haas)
On 11 August Peter Rundel conducts the œnm at the sold-out performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’ Open Spaces at this year’s Salzburg Festival. On percussion: virtuoso Martin Grubinger.
In 1939, at the age of 21, Gottfried von Einem came across the first play written by 22-year-old Georg Büchner – and was overwhelmed. The result of this encounter, Dantons Tod, was the first opera by a living composer to be premiered at the Salzburg Festival – exactly seventy years ago, on 6 August 1947.
Unlike in Büchner’s play, the people – the revolution – play one of the leading roles and the chorus scenes are among the most effective that were composed by von Einem in his basically tonal score. The work has maintained its important role in the opera repertoire to this day.
Antony Beaumont’s new critical edition of Alexander Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy will be performed for the first time in Macao on 29 July. Lü Jia conducts the Macao Orchestra in this concert performance.
Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe, Magnificat and Da Pacem Domine will be performed on 28 July together with works by Johann Sebastian Bach at this year’s Reykholt Festival, one of the oldest and most established music festivals in Iceland. Hörður Áskelsson conducts the Schola Cantorum and the Reykholt Festival Chamber Orchestra.
the most conservative orchestras, the most specialized small groups, they all at some point recognize the genius, greatness, and modesty of what he does.
At the same time, he’s obsessed with how it has to be, he would never move an inch to the left or to the right. For me, he’s a Schubert of our time. (Matthias Pintscher on Jay Schwartz)
Jeffrey Arlo Brown of VAN Magazine talked to German-born, New York-based composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher about Pierre Boulez, whether it’s more fun to conduct or to compose, and about fellow composer Jay Schwartz.
On 15 July Leoš Janáček’s Katya Kabanova made a welcome return to Opera Holland Park in Olivia Fuchs’ highly-regarded production. Sian Edwards conducts the City of London Sinfonietta, with Julia Sporsén in the title role.
The Schwäbisch Gmünd Festival Europäische Kirchenmusik honours Wolfgang Rihm with their annual “Preis der Europäischen Kirchenmusik.” Rihm would have accepted the prize on Saturday, 15 July, however he won’t be able to attend the ceremony due to a severe illness. At 8pm works by Rihm will be performed under the baton of Jörg-Hannes Hahn.