Tom Service's latest blog-entry is about the music of György Kurtág. In one of the comments, a reader compares Kurtág to Pierre Boulez - calling them “the last surviving link[s] to the great composers born in the 1920s.” What do you think?
Congratulations to the RIAS Kammerchor for winning the Prix
Caecilia 2013 for their recording of Wolfgang
Rihm’s Astralis – choral works under Hans-Christoph Rademann.
You can listen to excerpts and order the CD here.
Congratulations again to Georg Friedrich Haas for winning the Musikpreis Salzburg 2013! For our German speaking readers: here are two reviews of yesterday’s event:
 Lucerne Festival_Priska_KettererWeb.jpg "GEORG_FRIEDRICH_HAAS (c) Lucerne Festival_Priska_Ketterer")
Tomorrow, 28 February 2013, the world première of Georg Friedrich Haas’ … wie stille brannte das Licht for soprano
and piano takes place at the Philharmonie Luxembourg. The concert starts at 20:04 and you can listen to a live transmission of it here.
Sarah Wegener, whose enormous vocal range and incredible facility with precise microtonal intonation inspired Haas to write the part as if tailor-made for her, sings soprano.
Adrian Eröd and the Aron Quartett will play Othmar Schoeck's Notturno on 26 February 2013 at the Musikverein in Vienna. Furthermore, Alexander Zemlinsky’s String Quartet No. 4 and Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade will be performed.
In his 45-minute work, the Swiss composer set to music poems of mourning, loneliness and despair by Nikolaus Lenau, as well as a fragment by Gottfried Keller. Schoeck chose the title Notturno for a reason: it matches the dark underlying character of the music, which expresses the pain, the lamentation and the resignation of the narrator in a late-romantic style.
Happy Birthday György Kurtág
This picture was taken after the first performance of Gilbert Kaplan's new arrangement for chamber orchestra of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 at the Konzerthaus in Vienna.
Although performed by a smaller-than-usual orchestra, it was still an impressive experience.
_adrian_bradshaw_ws_153.jpg "Gilbert Kaplan (c) Adrian Bradshaw")
The inextricable link between Gilbert Kaplan and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 is familiar to just about every music lover. The arrangement for chamber orchestra of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 by Gilbert Kaplan and Rob Mathes makes it possible for chamber orchestras to perform this piece, for which usually more than 100 musicians are needed.
The world première of the arrangement takes place on 17 February 2013 at the Wiener Konzerthaus, with Gilbert Kaplan conducting the Wiener KammerOrchester, the Wiener Singakademie and the soloists Marlis Petersen, soprano and Janina Baechle, mezzo-soprano.
Symphony No. 2
for soli, mixed choir and small orchestra | 80‘
2 2 2 2 - 3 3 2 1 - timp, perc, hp, org, str
17/2/2013, Konzerthaus, Vienna; Marlis Petersen, s; Janina Baechle, ms; Wiener
Singakademie; Wiener Kammerorchester, cond. Gilbert Kaplan
BBC Four’s The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Music, a three-part series focusing on the revolution of music in the 20th century, starts tomorrow, 12 February 2013. Among others, Arvo Pärt takes part in it.
The series will be continued on 19 and 26 February.
Happy Birthday Yukiko Watanabe!
The winner of the Ö1 Talentebörse – Kompositionspreis 2011 on her work ver_flies_sen:
This piece's German title has three meanings, all of which are phonically unrelated in English: Fliese (= n.: tile), fließen (= v.i.: to flow, to stream) and verfließen (= v.i. pass by).
I had started writing the piece when I saw the beautiful picture O Hungaro (The Hungarian) by the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão, in which she depicts a tiled swimming pool. The tiles – all of them of identical - seem to be contorted, due to the water.
That became the inspiration for my piece. First, I built the fundament – nine invisible layers, all of them moving in different tempi; then I placed suitable notes overtop.
The music is in constant motion, sometimes losing its shape inscrutably, like tiles in the water or vague old memories as one looks back on them.
On his blog Entartete
Musik, Gavin Plumley reviews Gustavo Dudamel’s recent recording of
Mahler’s 9th Symphony, noticing “yearning tempo changes” and “the feeling of an
unstoppable juggernaut”.
In September 2010, we interviewed Gustavo Dudamel for our new publication Gustav Mahler: The Conductors’ Interviews (you can watch all of the video-interviews here). Dudamel himself describes the music of the 9th as “perfect. You don’t have to do anything. The notes are there and the indications, ‘faster’, ‘slower’, ‘pianissimo’, ‘sostenuto’, ‘marcato’, everything. The only thing you can add is the energy and the vision.”
Furthermore, he remembers what Sir John Berbirolli once said about Jacqueline du Pré: “If you don’t exaggerate when you’re young, then what are you going to do when you’re old?”
Viva el Tango!
Diego Collatti will be guest at the Ö1 Spielräume Nachtausgabe on 8 February at 23:03. The topic of his talk with Mirjam Jessa: “Tango – danced passion”.