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:
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.
While I was writing it I had not yet heard Grubinger play […] Yet today I read that I had written the piece as if tailor-made for him and – although he described it as the most difficult thing he had ever played – he made it his own so brilliantly that the description seemed to fit. (Friedrich Cerha)
Tonight virtuoso percussionist Martin Grubinger presents the Monegasque première of Friedrich Cerha’s Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra at the Auditorium Rainer III. Kazuki Yamada conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo.
Bologna Modern runs from 14 to 23 October at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. Universal Edition is strongly represented, with performances by Georg Friedrich Haas, Wolfgang Rihm, Friedrich Cerha and Alban Berg.
Friedrich Cerha, the doyen of Austrian composers, celebrates his 90th birthday today, on 17 February.
As a composer, conductor, ensemble founder, teacher and supporter, Friedrich Cerha embodies a pioneering spirit and has opened doors and brought the unknown into local concert halls. His friends and companions congratulate him on his birthday with very personal statements.
On 27 January the Boulanger Trio presents a concert with music by Mozart, Berg and Cerha at the Musikverein Vienna. Friedrich Cerha will be guest of honour.
The concert will be accompanied by a conversation with the composer, who celebrates his 90th birthday this February.
London’s Wigmore Hall celebrates the imminent ninetieth birthday of Friedrich Cerha with a day devoted to the composer’s works.
On 10 October Friedrich Cerha Day presents a major retrospective of the composer’s chamber works performed by close colleagues and musicians steeped in his multi-faceted art. Among the performers will be the Boulanger Trio, who you can see together with the composer pictured above.
For me, the organ music by Friedrich Cerha and Johann Sebastian Bach is congenial. They are characterized by timeless features such as clarity, vitality, thinking in counterpoint, the economy of the compositional means and a pronounced sense of proportions. (Wolfgang Kogert)
On 18 April Wolfgang Kogert, organist of the Wiener Hofburgkapelle, presents his brand new recording “B-A-Cer-Ha” at the RadioKulturhaus in Vienna.
On the CD, Kogert juxtaposes Cerha’s Neun Inventionen and Neun Präludien with pieces by Bach.
A live stream of the evening from the RadioKulturhaus will be available on 18 April at 19:30. Listen live.
Together with HK Gruber, Hans Kann, H. C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm, Fritz Wotruba and many others, Friedrich Cerha was a frequent guest at the Viennese Strohkoffer [straw case]. In 1987, he finished the 60 miniatures of Eine Art Chansons, most of which are based on texts by members of the Viennese Group.
Agnes Heginger and Studio Dan will present a selection of Friedrich Cerha’s Eine Art Chansons at the Sargfabrik in Vienna on 14 December. After having been encouraged by the composer to record the pieces, this will be a preview of their upcoming CD.
The world première of Friedrich Cerha’s orchestral piece Nacht will open the Donaueschinger Musiktage tonight together with premières by Hans Zender, Manos Tsangaris and Hanspeter Kyburz.
The concert starts at 20:00 and will be broadcast by SWR2, listen live.
Cerha on Nacht:
“Composers are expected to operate as men of literature. They are supposed to write introductions to their works, author essays, give lectures. That means there are then musical elements in the foreground which are well presentable using linguistic means, or else – which is more often the case – ideologically and fashionably coloured aspects which are not necessarily crucially germane to the work concerned. Therefore scepticism could indeed be appropriate when considering what composers write; in reality, they are considered an authority in an area in which they are in fact dilettantes.”
Read the composer’s full work introduction.
Friedrich Cerha: Nacht
für Orchester | 20'
17.10.2014, Donaueschingen; SWR-SO Baden-Baden und Freiburg, Dir. Emilio Pomàrico
Listen to the Proms première of Friedrich Cerha’s Paraphrase on the Opening of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, which was performed together with Beethoven’s Ninth at the Prom 75 by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (cond. Alan Gilbert).
In the programme, Gilbert introduces the Paraphrase as “highly atmospheric […] [It] sets up kind of a wonderful stepping-stone from which you can enter the world of Beethoven 9. To me it sort of opens the world of possibility […] it lets the Beethoven really stand on its own.”
The composer on Paraphrase: “I hope very much that the gap between my Paraphrase and Beethoven’s work will not be perceived as an irreconcilable divide between two foreign elements, but that the pieces can instead be experienced as two related elements.”
View the full score of Cerha’s Paraphrase on Universal Edition.
micatonal, music austria’s new webradio for contemporary music from Austria, will be broadcasting portraits on Friedrich Cerha, Beat Furrer and Georg Friedrich Haas within the next days.
Tune in at the following times to listen to portraits on:
Friedrich Cerha: 5. July, 18:00
Beat Furrer: 8. July, 19:00
Georg Friedrich Haas: 11. July, 19:00
View the full programme on micatonal.
I have always been a curious person, and have always reflected on my own work. When a composition was finished, I wanted to find out exactly what had happened in it. This made me open to new influences. (Friedrich Cerha)
Happy 88th Birthday Friedrich Cerha.
Cerha talks about his music:
German interview with English subtitles.
Watch arte’s and the hr-Sinfonieorchester’s video stream of the orchestra’s concert on 7 February 2014 at the Alte Oper Frankfurt:
On the programme were the world première of Friedrich Cerha’s Tagebuch and performances of Haydn’s Symphony No. 59, Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. The concert was performed by Arabella Steinbacher and the hr-Sinfonieorchester (cond. Andrés Orozco-Estrada).
Find out more at arte and on the website of the hr-Sinfonieorchester.