Dresden Music Festival

After rehearsing Way of Light with Camilla Hoitenga on Friday the 9th, in preparation for the premiere of the version for flute that I arranged for her, Yvonne and I attended the opening concert of the Dresdner Musikfestspiele. Almut Kühne, a native of Dresden (now living in Berlin), and a terrific young singer and composer who specializes in improvisation, invited us to stay with her family at their exquisite home overlooking the Elbe River. She’s striding forward to greet us, in front of the Semperoper, where we then heard a dramatic rendition of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, followed by the Kodály Te Deum---clearing the air and cleansing the space after Bluebeard’s gloomy presence. The outstanding soloists: Krassimira Stoyanova, soprano; Lioba Braun, mezzo-soprano; Howard Haskin, tenor, and Rudolf Rosen, bass. Harmut Haenchen (left in the photo) was the dynamic conductor, and also directs the Musikfestspiele this year. Setting the disturbing and dark mood for the Bartok just prior to the performance, the actor Eörs Kisfaludy can be seen standing between the bass and alto singer, in one of their many curtain calls. The orchestra and chorus, also first-rate: Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR, and the MDR Rundfunkchor. Bartok’s blending of the organ with the strings, using it to shadow the orchestra, contributes to the melancholy infusing his only opera.

This was my first visit to Dresden (from a word meaning ‘people of the riverside forest’) and I was utterly entranced by the beauty and vitality of this city. Hard to believe, with all of the restoration, that Dresden suffered mightily and unnecessarily from bombing attacks carried out by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Air Force, and was ensconced in the Soviet bloc state of the GDR for the next forty years. The Frauenkirche, where Bach gave a recital on the original Silbermann organ in 1736, underwent extensive rebuilding after the war. A symbol of reconciliation towering over a bustling square, it was completed only as recently as 2005. Cobblestone streets lined with all manner of restaurants radiate out from the church, and the majestic Elbe flows past it all. Who wouldn’t fall in love with Dresden?

The heavenly joy that has no end

Words from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, sung in Mahler's Third Symphony.

In four hours we depart for Dresden, where the very active American musician living in Köln, Camilla Hoitenga, will perform the flute version of my work, Way of Light, for video and electronics. I’m excited, as this will be the first time it’s performed with flute (it was written for trumpet), and Camilla is a world-class performer. The venue is the Hygiene Museum, and Camilla's concert, called "Syrinx," is one of the opening concerts of the Dresdner Musikfestspiele.

A couple of evenings back I was lucky enough to find someone selling a standing room only ticket to the Vienna Philharmonic’s performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony---his homage, or hymn, to the natural world. Imagine standing for nearly two hours, 10 people deep and 15 or 20 across, with no support. Something akin to a packed subway car stalled for who knows how long...except that Mahler’s music wafting through one of the most divine acoustic and visual concert spaces in the world makes the sardine experience quite something else. As the photo I took right after the concert shows, the large hall of the Musikverein is in fact a remarkably intimate space. The orchestra was crammed into every nook and corner for the performance, with some audience members literally inches away from musicians.

The prolific, feisty, and incredibly energetic composer Nancy Van de Vate, who resides in Austria and who I shared a delightful evening with yesterday, informed me that the the subscription tickets for these concerts are inherited...which explains their scarcity. She also told me that some 1500 people are on a multi-year waiting list for subscriptions to the Vienna Philharmonic concerts.

The first of six movements, alone, is about 35 minutes. The large forces include women’s chorus and boys’ choir, both deployed in the fifth movement, as well as a solo mezzo soprano. The mischievous clarinetist captured the grotesque fantastical qualities that Mahler is so fond of , and the contrabasses, at times, sounded as though they were performing a much more contemporary work, evoking crunchy noise-infused textures. Elĩna Garanča, was the mezzo soprano, and Semyon Bychkov conducted. The famous last long chord blanketed the audience with sheer bliss. After some moments of silence, ferociously appreciative applause poured forth, and rightly so, as the performance was superb.

By the way, Tony Duggan's thorough review of this conductor's recording of Mahler's Third, with the WDR Symphony Orchestra on the Avie label, can be found here (along with his reviews of most if not all of the Mahler symphonies). Scroll down to the very bottom of the page to find it.

Bread and Music

The Museum of Modern Art, located in the Museum Quarter, held beautiful surprises for Yvonne and I yesterday. She was especially attracted to Daniel Spoerri’s “Hahns Abendmahl" ("Hahn’s Supper"), a ‘trap picture.' A dinner party for 16 people was frozen in time, with remains of cigarettes, coffee residue, stained wine glasses and plates all attached to a black board with artificial resin glue, and hung on the wall...documentation of an event that occurred on May 23, 1964. The photograph in this post, another of the artist’s ‘trap pictures’, was dated three years earlier...a series of petrified hunks of ‘Brot.’ The highlight for me in our tour of the museum was an extensive collection of Fluxus pieces and ephemera. The infamous Symphony No. 461 – A Pastoral Symphony, by Dick Higgins, created by shooting blank score manuscript pages with an air gun - was one of his three symphonies in the exhibit.

The museum was so entrancing, with its current exhibition comparing art and mathematics, that we stayed until closing. I raced to the Konzerthaus, with the intention of attending the concert in the Mozart Hall performed by Klangforum Wien. But my system...to purchase a ticket from one of several people trying to sell their unused tickets near the front entrance...led to an accidental purchase of the concert ticket for the Great Hall, realized as I was heading back into the building. No matter...I heard an utterly intoxicating performance of the Shostakovitch Violin Concerto No.1, played by Julia Fischer, with precision, passion, and great mastery. The conductor was Yakov Kreizberg.

Low strings open the first movement, Notturno, in contrast to the high register dominating the mid-point of the movement, with stratospheric violin enhanced by harp harmonics and celesta, and an eventual descent back to lower strings and timpani. The manic, pesante-like Scherzo even has the celesta player beating a tambourine. The third movement, a Passacalgia, outlines a theme related to Beethoven’s Fifth and to the Seventh Symphony of Shostakovitch. Lumbering through the low brass and pizzicato contrabass, it takes on a strident quality when it cycles around to the solo violin. Seamlessly emerging from the passacaglia, the arpeggios outlined by the violin lead to an electrifying, complex, difficult and long cadenza. To lighten the atmosphere, the Burleske comes right after, with its grotesque character, true to the Shostakovitch style.

At the intermission I was able to hear the last work on the Klangforum Wien program, La harpe de mélodie, by Brice Pauset...an aggressive, yet spacious work played with great commitment and featuring two percussionists.

ensemble on_line in the echoraum

ensemble on_line: Ivana Pristasova, violin; Petra Ackerman, viola; Krassimir Sterev, accordion; Thomas Wally, Violin, Roland Schueler, cello, on Sunday, May 4, in the concert venue echoraum.

Whether a concert takes place in a tight space no larger than a California McMansion walk-in closet, or the spacious Great Hall of the Vienna Konzerthaus, and whether the style is dominated by electronics and noise or by the most exquisite string sonorities, there’s one aspect that never changes. Viennese audiences are consistently intent, concentrated, and focused. One rarely hears shuffling, coughing, or commentary, and no one arrives late. This observation was further solidified by four concerts I’ve heard thus far this week, in the space of three evenings, all in vastly contrasting venues.

Wolfgang Rihm wrote a series of works, several of which are for strings and accordion, that he calls Fetzen (translated as ‘fragment’). On Sunday evening, the ensemble on_line undertook a scintillating rendition of six of the Fetzen (No. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)---five for string quartet and accordion, and one for viola and accordion. No. 6 was especially striking, with the two violins filtered through metal practice mutes, with a tinny perpetual motion gestures....and viola and cello waiting patiently until the end, when they enter with completely foreign material---a chorale fragment functioning as a coda.

Two works for solo piano were programmed as well, with splendid performances by Mathilde Hoursiangou. Spiel(t)räume, by Simeon Pironkoff (also a well-respected conductor), in two contrasting parts, manipulates the way that memory works by investigating the relationships between materials that have become familiar to the listener through repetition, and material that is new. The composer writes that the gaps that develop in the play of fluctuations between repetition and memory might well be more significant than the actual aspects of repetition and memory. Polyrhythms of layers, frequently defined by dynamics and register characterized the second section of this work.

Alexander Stankovski’s tour de force, Frescobaldi da lontano, a series of twenty variations based upon Girolamo Frescobaldis Capriccio cromatico con ligature al contrario (1626), employs an array of techniques (overlay, filtering, transposition, and anagram) that also capitalize on the Fibonacci sequence (intrinsic to the Frescobaldi work). A few of the variations are mere phrases – like a truncated gesture, often in a jazz idiom that distinctly contrasts with the other material. In fact, four of the twenty variations are completely unrelated to the Frescobaldi. The only variation performed inside the piano (well, mostly inside), elicits a bouquet of consonances by means of stopped string harmonics, plucked strings, and normal key attacks...but takes a brief detour into more dissonant harmonic combinations, leading to the phenomenon of beats, before coming to a sudden end.

Biographies of the composers and further program notes can be found here.

Last night I attended a performance of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1, followed by the last half of a program given by Klangforum Wien. Tonight, Mahler’s Third Symphony. Accounts of both will follow in the next couple of posts.

The Pink Panther Visits Mauer

The Pink Panther theme (observe the giant pink paw prints) was the unifying thread running through the 11th grade Singabend, produced on May 2 and 3 at the Rudolf Steiner-Schule Wien-Mauer, where Yvonne attends school this spring. Their ambitious program included several scene changes, ranging from the Pink Panther bar – in full saloon regalia – to a romantic moonlight park, to a tropical island replete with palm trees and grass skirts. Almost all the students sang solos of their own choosing, mostly pop songs in English but also more classically oriented in German, Russian, Swedish, and Hungarian. In fact, there were at least a dozen Hungarian students visiting who performed one of the most interesting works, for me...A ket myarfa, with recorders, flutes, and strings, and in 5/8 at a fast clip. Ein unterhaltener Abend!

Maypole Dance

Thanks to everyone for writing to me with such encouraging remarks about the descriptions of my life posted every day here, come hell or high water, and that’s really true...read on. Sigh, here I am in the Sofitel Hotel lobby bar, sipping a Bier vom Fass, and charging the laptop for the second time today. The ancient fuses in my apartment went berserk and are now on strike. After the Schönberg House concert yesterday, then a leisurely coffee afterwards with my friend Christine, I returned to find a dark apartment, water covering the kitchen floor (slippery, from the freezer ice melting), and for two days and nights now have gone without power. Try finding an electrician in Vienna on a Friday afternoon. After searching for a couple of hours I did finally locate a live repairman, whose shop was still open, but he couldn’t be bothered to show up and repair whatever has gone wrong until Monday. Let's have a happier ending to the day...I’ll try to find a photo that looks....hopeful, not sad! In fact, here's a glimpse of the May Pole dance that Christine and I lucked into witnessing yesterday in Mödling, a village close enough to Vienna to be a suburb. This was a ribbon dance, where the white and red ribbons (Frauen took the white, Herren the red) were intertwined and plaited into a web. The dancers then retraced their steps exactly to unravel the ribbons---a spatial retrograde event, just down the street from Schönberg's house!

Schönberg's Home in Mödling

This afternoon I joined a couple of dozen others on a bus chartered to drive us from the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna to his former home in Mödling, to partake of a concert and open house. Speeches by Ferdinand Rubel, Vice-Mayor of Mödling; Christian Meyer, Director of the Arnold Schönberg Center; and Nuria Schönberg Nono, President of the Arnold Schönberg Center, were given in the garden, with birds, roosters, childen, and lilacs at their peak contributing to the festive atmosphere. Marion Diederichs-Lafite gave a moving speech explaining the opening of the the “Lafite-Saal” in the Schönberg House, in memory of Prof. Elisabeth Lafite, who rescued the house from immanent destruction. We then were treated to a concert of music by the Chorus Chemie Linz, conducted by Fritz Hinterdorfer...with Hans Eisler’s Lob des Lernens (words by Brecht) and Schönberg’s Herzlieblich Lieb, durch Scheiden as two of the highlights. As I have no electricity tonight, I’m racing to post this before the computer dies, and hope that it conveys how incredibly special it was for me to visit the home of Schönberg, and to meet some of his descendants were were also present for the occasion.