Fortissimo Spring 2018

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Torsten Rasch Selected forthcoming performances Die Formel world premiere 2.3-14.4.18, Stadttheater, Bern, Switzerland: Vokalensemble ardent/Camerata Bern/Jonathan Stockhammer/dir. Gerd Heinz …in umbra… world premiere 22-23.3.18, Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes, Valladolid, Spain: Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León/Andrew Gourlay Violin Concerto 28.4.18, Koger Center for the Arts, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA: Mira Wang/ South Carolina Philharmonic/ Morihiko Nakahara Benjamin Britten Selected forthcoming performances Death in Venice 19.5-6.7.18, Landestheater Linz, Linz, Austria: Landestheater Linz/Roland Böer/dir. Hermann Schneider 13.6-5.7.18, Opernhaus, Stuttgart, German: Staatsorchester Stuttgart/ Marco Comin/dir. Demis Volpi The Sword in the Stone: Concert Suite 26-27.5.18, Théâtre d’Orléans, Scène Nationale, Orléans, France: Orchestre Symphonique d’Orléans/Marius Stieghorst (‘Bird Music’ only) Paul Bunyan 3-8.9.18, Wilton’s Music Hall, London, UK: English National Opera/ Matthew Kofi Waldren/dir. Jamie Manton String Quartet No. 3 8.9.18, South Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Australian String Quartet Torsten Rasch Looking back to 1918 In March and April 2018 Konzerttheater Bern will stage Die Formel, an ambitious interdisciplinary work for singers, actors and orchestra with music by Torsten Rasch. 100 years after the end of the First World War and the October Revolution, Doris Reckewell’s text takes Bern’s important role as a neutral waystation and imagines an encounter between seven of the twentieth century’s most culturally important figures who passed through the city: the revolutionary exile Lenin with his wife; the emancipated social pedagogue Nadeshda Krupskaja; the as-yet-unknown physicist Albert Einstein and his wife Mileva Marić; the artist Paul Klee and his pianist wife Lily; as well as the young, uprooted poet Robert Walser. Jonathan Stockhammer will conduct Camerata Bern and Vokalensemble ardent in a production directed by Gerd Heinz. from the depths… A commission from Andrew Gourlay and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, Rasch’s latest orchestral work, …in umbra…, is based on the Lutheran chorale ‘Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir’, also known as ‘De Profundis’. Rasch chose the chorale, he writes, out of a desire ‘to convey the meaning of its text; of its sense of being lost and crying out from the depths of a dark place – a place in the shadows’. The work is not a set of variations in the traditional sense, but rather sees Rasch take each of the chorale’s seven phrases as the starting point for far reaching extemporisations, which radically re-cast the material and make it thrillingly resonant with today. …in umbra…will be premiered in Valladolid, Spain in late March, with Andrew Gourlay conducting the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León. Explore the Music of Torsten Rasch with our Online Score Library: scorelibrary.fabermusic.com myth, magic, music, and madness Rasch’s dramatic Violin Concerto ‘Tropoi’ received its US premiere in January with two performances by Mira Wang and the Spokane Symphony under Eckart Preu. Wang performs the work again in April with the South Carolina Philharmonic and Morihiko Nakahara. This substantial four-movement work – the composer’s first concerto – was inspired by Helmut Krausser’s captivating 1993 novel Melodien, in which myth, magic, music, and madness interact in a dark, and increasingly disturbing narrative. Unfolding over 20 minutes, this weighty statement is everything we have come to expect from Rasch: a large orchestra is masterfully handled, whilst the hefty solo part, with its many knotty twists and turns, offers violinists numerous opportunities to showcase their technical – and interpretative – virtuosity. ‘The entire world of music has been made richer by the addition of an important new violin concerto by Rasch… Its reception was enthusiastic, due in no small degree to the blazing advocacy of the soloist… Rasch’s mastery of orchestral effect allows him to exploit the obvious cinematic potential of the tale, from the eerie, timeless stillness from which the powerful tropoi emerge to their wild confrontation, and ultimate conquest, of the forces of destruction and disorder. Both the source and target of this potent energy is the violinist, who is required to exploit resources of the instrument that Paganini never dreamed of. Wang brought even the most bizarre and strenuous of Rasch’s imaginings before us as things of beauty: colorful, evocative and consoling. From the lowest chest tones of her Stradivarius to its stratospheric harmonics, her command of bow speed and pressure produced tropes of delight and amazement.’ The Spokesman-Review (Larry Lapidus), 28 January 2018 Benjamin Britten Britten in America In September English National Opera will present a new production of Benjamin Britten’s first work for stage, Paul Bunyan, at Wilton’s Music Hall. The production will be directed by Jamie Manton, designed by Camilla Clarke and conducted by ENO Charles Mackerras Conducting Fellow Matthew Kofi Waldren. Britten created Bunyan with W. H. Auden in 1941 during his self-imposed American exile, and sought to capture the spirit of the booming, forward-looking country around them with a mixture of affection and irreverence. Auden’s lyrical, subtle satire interweaves with a score that sees the young Britten at his most playful and inventive: folk, blues and Broadway are incorporated into a musical language that remains distinctively his. 20 PHOTO: TORSTEN RASCH © MAURICE FOXALL
TUNING IN Jonathan Harvey ‘Speakings’ In January one of Jonathan Harvey’s late masterpieces received a rare performance from the Basel Sinfonietta, SWR Experimentalstudio and Baldur Brönnimann. Speakings for orchestra and electronics was composed in 2008 during Harvey’s time as Composer in Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and utilises a unique process of electronic transformation developed at IRCAM to explore the possibility that an orchestra could be made to ‘speak’. Winner of the prestigious Monaco Prize, the 25-minute work belongs to that fascinating clutch of works composed around the time of Harvey’s final opera, Wagner Dream, which contain musical allusions to Wagner, in this case Parsifal. Unfolding over three continuous movements, the music moves from the babbling of a baby and the frenetic chatter of human life in all its expressions, to music of unity, a hymn which is close to Gregorian chant in which, in Harvey’s words ‘the paradise of the sounding temple is imagined’. Faber Music has developed a new typeset edition of Speakings that was used for this performance and will be released on sale soon. From chaos to stasis In Wheel of Emptiness, Harvey’s 1997 ensemble work for 16 players, the often chaotic foreground instrumental activity is heard against the background calm of a sampler’s harmonic spectra, resulting in a gradual progression from ever-changing to measured stasis. Commissioned by the Belgian ensemble Ictus – who later recorded it – the 16-minute work will be performed in Paris this April by Ensemble intercontemporain and Daniel Harding. Choral Publications Faber Music is pleased to announce the publication of two new editions of Harvey choral works: Forms of Emptiness, and Plainsongs for Peace and Light. For full details, see page 28. John Woolrich Revisiting the Oboe Concerto All concertos are built from a mismatch of forces: the individual against the crowd, solo against tutti. Many composers have intensified this discrepancy by banishing the solo instrument from the orchestra, so that the colour of the solo and the tutti are as different as possible. John Woolrich, however, takes a different approach in his Oboe Concerto: rather than isolating the soloist, he has filled the orchestra with the mournful noise of its singing: the oboe is surrounded by an attendant group of three oboes and their more extrovert second cousin, the soprano saxophone. But the oppositions are still there – the drama and the poetry of the work flow from the contrast between the fragile keening of the oboe and the brutal power of a large symphony orchestra. The 26-minute work was premiered, and recorded, by Nicholas Daniel, who revived it in January with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jonathan Berman. ‘A real tour de force… Quiet passages contrasted with sections that seemed to explore the outermost limits of dramatic expression and sheer decibel content… not only musically satisfying but dramatically exciting.’ Seen and Heard (Paul Corfield Godfrey), 2 February 2018 ‘It had an immensity which I have heard little of in contemporary music… simply astounding.’ Mozart refashioned The Sprout (Weeping Tudor), 21 February 2018 Whilst many will be familiar with Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes – an achingly beautiful reworking of Monteverdi for viola and strings which receives performances in the UK, Australia and the Netherlands in the coming months – fewer may know his The Theatre Represents a Garden: Night which will be performed by the Morley Chamber Orchestra and Charles Peebles in May. A 19-minute journey through Mozart, which Woolrich describes as ‘a necklace of fragments, transcriptions and recompositions’ the work was composed in 1991 for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. All the material comes, in one way or another, from Mozart (principally unfinished or sketched pieces) which Woolrich artfully stitches together, twisting the classical harmonies to relate to each other in sly modern ways, teasing out extra beats in the bar, and slipping in ‘wrong’ chords and improbable orchestrations. Jonathan Harvey Selected forthcoming performances Bhakti 17.3.18: Great Guild Hall, Riga, Latvia: Sinfonietta Riga/Normunds Sne Wheel of Emptiness 5.4.18, Philharmonie, Paris, France: Ensemble Intercontemporain/Daniel Harding Bird Concerto with Pianosong 15.4.18, Barnes Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA: Ryan MacEvoy McCullough/Ensemble X/ Timothy Weiss Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco/String Quartet No. 4 24.4.18, Firth Hall, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK: Ligeti Quartet Ricercare una melodia (oboe)/ Tombeau de Messiaen/Run Before Lightning 2.7.18, Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Inventi Ensemble/Melissa Doecke/ Ben Opie/Peter de Jager John Woolrich Selected forthcoming performances Ulysses Awakes 2.5.18, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam Sinfonietta/Daniel Bard 11.5.18, Max Richter’s Sounds and Visions, Barbican Centre, London, UK: 12 ensemble 14.6.18, Melbourne Recital Centre; 16.6.18, South Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Lawrence Power/Australian National Academy of Music The Theatre Represents a Garden: Night 3.5.18, Morley College, London, UK: Morley Chamber Orchestra/Charles Peebles Scarlatti Sonatas Set 2 11,13.5.18, Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge; 13.5.18, Binham Priory, Binham, Norfok, UK: Anglia Ruskin University/ Christopher Tarrant A Book of Studies Set 1 28.6.18, Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross, Crediton; 6.12.18, Assembly Room, The Council House, Chichester, UK: Magnard Ensemble Pianobooks II, VI, VII, IX, XII, XIV, XV World premiere of XV 15.11.18, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK: Clare Hammond PHOTOS: JONATHAN HARVEY © LAURIE LEWIS; JOHN WOOLRICH © MAURICE FOXALL 21
Page 1 and 2: FABER MUSIC NEWS — SPRING 2018 fo
Page 3 and 4: HIGHLIGHTS ‘I first met Donald in
Page 5 and 6: HIGHLIGHTS Tansy Davies Selected fo
Page 7 and 8: HIGHLIGHTS Julian Anderson celebrat
Page 9 and 10: TUNING IN Anders Hillborg The orche
Page 11 and 12: TUNING IN ‘Written on Skin’ in
Page 13 and 14: TUNING IN David Matthews ‘New Fir
Page 15 and 16: TUNING IN Tom Coult Études feature
Page 17 and 18: TUNING IN Carl Davis Bintley’s
Page 19: TUNING IN Carl Vine Melbourne resid
Page 23 and 24: NEW PUBLICATIONS AND RECORDINGS Ins
Page 25 and 26: A Concerto for Comedian and Orchest
Page 27 and 28: Bärenreiter focus: the music of Mi

Fortissimo Spring 2018

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