Violin

Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Festivals, Interviews, Other Minds, San Francisco, Violin, Women composers

Let’s Ask Lisa Bielawa

Lisa Bielawa2009 Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize winner Lisa Bielawa has returned to her hometown of San Francisco to take part in the 2010 Other Minds festival. Her piece, Kafka Songs, will close the first night of the festival on Thursday, March 4th.  Violinist, vocalist and rock star Carla Kihlstedt, for whom Kafka Songs was written, will perform.  OM 15 takes place at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, and tickets can be purchased online here.

Despite her whirlwind schedule leading up to the festival, Lisa was able to take time out to answer a few of my questions.

S21:  During your student years, did you ever feel pressure to become exclusively a composer, or exclusively a performer?

LB:  Since I received musical training at home as a child (my parents are both musicians as well), in college I decided to major in French literature, not music. I didn’t think of myself as either a performer or a composer really until later, when I was trying to figure out how to make a living.

S21:  What parameters have you set up for yourself for allotting time and energy to composing, versus performing?

LB:  Decisions about which projects to do, whether composing or performing, have to be made very carefully. Above all, I want every musical experience I have, no matter what form my participation takes, to expand my own awareness, make me grow in some way. It is also wonderful if it can provide a focused inquiry for me around some particular musical issue I am fascinated by or grappling with at the moment in my compositional work. I suppose this is the ultimate test for me: if involvement in some project will result in making me better able to accomplish/address the things I want to accomplish/address in my composing (thereby making my work communicate better and clearer), then I will make the time to do this. Many performing experiences have done this for me, so I do not begrudge the time I invest in them, even though in the short term they may “take me away” from composing.

S21:  Having grown up steeped in the San Francisco arts community, did you experience culture shock when you moved to New York in 1990?

LB:  I had 4 years at Yale in between, which were really important ones for me. Although I wasn’t majoring in music, I was involved in vocal music and jazz through various student-run groups, and these experiences were an important transition time for me. Many of the musical friends I made at Yale came to New York as well, so the transition was rather smooth, under the circumstances. Of course there was the shock of being an adult and needing to figure out how to earn money and live a real life.  These things were much more challenging than any cultural differences.

S21:  The Time Out New York review praised your “organic experimentation”.  Can the organic aspect of your work be identified, and how does it manifest?

LB:  I suppose (I hope!) this writer could have been responding to my practice of making work about and on people. I am not so interested in experimentation as an abstract value, as much as I am interested in how one might use “experimental” or creative, unexpected ways to celebrate and heighten awareness of a particular performance experience, involving specific people in a specific place and time. This means that if I am writing for one unique performer who sings and plays the violin at the same time (that’s Carla), I will experiment with ways to celebrate and heighten the awesome strangeness and wonder of this act, whereas if I am writing for a 70-member volunteer orchestra of community music lovers (as I happen to be doing at the moment, for the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra), I will experiment with ways to heighten their experience of music-making in a community with intense musical passion and a broad range of abilities.

(more…)

by Polly Moller
CDs, Contemporary Classical, Interviews, Violin

Talking with Jennifer Koh

Violinist Jennifer Koh has, since even before this past Spring showed its face, been pretty much living out of a suitcase or two. Crisscrossing this country and a couple other continents, She’s been playing everything from Antonio Vivaldi to John Zorn. Just last week she was beautifully acquitting herself at Miller Theatre, in a performance of Kaija Saariaho’s Graal Theatre. December is about all the break she’s getting, too, before it starts all over again.

In the middle of all this came her newest CD on Cedille, Rhapsodic Musings, a collection of solo violin music almost all composed within the last ten years: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen Verlernt (2002), Elliott Carter’s Four Lauds (1984-2000), Augusta Read Thomas’ Pulsar (2003), and John Zorn’s Goetia (2002). It’s an intensely involving and personal listen, definitely not simple showy fare, and the recording is close and crystalline. Here’s a short video of Jennifer talking about the genesis of the CD:

I recently had the chance to ask Jennifer a few questions via e-mail, and her answers follow:

S21: You’ve got quite a wide repertoire at your command, but when it’s come to recordings you haven’t gone with much in the way of the grand war-horses. The Szymanowski 1st is about as close as you’ve come, the rest delving back into lesser-known gems by Menotti, Martinu, Bartok… And then most recently lots of contemporary (and usually living) American and European composers. The pieces you choose — Higdon, Ruggles, Harrison, Salonen, Carter, Zorn — while often incredibly beautiful aren’t the stuff of easy crowd-pleasers. I get a bit of this feeling of you truly being taken deeply by something in each of these works, and bringing them to people almost like an excited kid shares their latest amazing discovery to their friends or parents. Am I getting warm here? …

JK: I just want to play music that I believe in!  This is true for music that is known or unknown, new or old.  When I play a piece, it means I will have lived with it in a very intimate and intense way for a long time and ultimately, I want to spend my life with music that I love and find meaningful.  If I discover a piece of music that I think is incredible but is not very well known, I do become fervently dedicated to it because I think it SHOULD be known to everyone and I want to share it with as many people as possible!  In the end, I don’t think I’m that different from the next person.  I’m just another member of society and I hope that if I find a piece of music to be compelling and interesting, then it will speak to other people as well.

S21:  These past few CDs you’ve gone from violin and orchestra, to violin and piano, to just solo violin. I know this can’t go much further (unless you toss the violin and just clap and sing!), but was that increasing intimacy and focus at all intentional? Does it feel any different when you make a CD where you know you’re responsible for every moment of sound on there?

JK: Everything about “Rhapsodic Musings” was intense and personal for me from the initial inspiration point for the program to the recording process to the actual compositions on this CD.  The idea for this CD came from a collective time of  shock and loss and I wanted to focus the CD into a personal  journey out of that collective experience.  During this same period of time, I saw the violin that one of my mentors, Felix Galimir played while he was alive.  Felix was a huge influence on me in so many ways especially because of the passionate relationship he had with the music that he worked on with the composers of his time which included Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.   When I played on Felix’s violin in the shop, I felt he was back with me because I heard him in that violin.  Violinists have very intense and intimate relationships with their instruments and it is almost impossible to separate the identity between violin and violinist because each lives in the other. I feel like my violin  is a part of me and I chose a solo violin program for “Rhapsodic Musings” because I wanted to express that personal relationship between violin and violinist. (more…)

by Steve Layton
Chicago, Flute, Interviews, Podcasts, Violin

My Ears Are Open, ensemble dal niente

pre-season_party.jpg.w300h400I thought it might be nice to close out the month of interviews from Chicago by featuring a couple musicians from dal niente.  The ensemble has some great concerts planned for October, but I caught violinist Austin Wulliman and flutist Shanna Gutierrez back in June.

Austin’s episode is worth listening to just to hear him say, “I love me some Scelsi”.  You don’t hear that very often, but it’s true, oh so true.  Shanna talks a little in her episode about interesting experiences with composers, but the real value is in the seemingly endless list of resources she mentions if you are writing for flute, or are just thinking about writing for flute.

Listen to Austin’s interview here and Shanna’s here.  Subscribe to the podcast here.

Ensemble dal niente begins their season on Friday with what they are calling OKTOBERFest.  You can find all the details on their website.  How many groups are pairing Franco Donatoni with John Luther Adams, or Bach with Rihm, or Helmut Lachenmann one week and Arvo Pärt the next week?  They are doing it all in October – I wish I could be there!

Friday, October 2 – 7:30pm ($10/5)
Columbia College Concert Hall, 1014 S. Michigan Ave.

Sunday, October 4 – 3 pm ($5)
Sherwood Conservatory of Music at Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan Ave.

Sunday, October 18 – 2:00pm ($5)
Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, 4802 N. Broadway Ave.

Sunday, October 25 – 3:00pm (FREE!)
Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.

by James Holt
Interviews, Podcasts, Violin

My Ears Are Open, ETHEL. Part I.

dufallo_bioI am excited to say that this month on the podcast I am featuring all four members ETHEL. I was able to spend some time with the band before their performance at the Bang on a Can Marathon and would like to thank them for being so generous with their time. It was difficult to decide who should go first, so I’ve decided to go alphabetical by last name (brilliant, right?!), which means that we’ll begin with violinist, Cornelius Dufallo.

If you want to keep up with this series, I’d recommend subscribing in iTunes or through your blog-reader. Or, you can listen to this week’s episode now by clicking here.

Check back on July 16 (for violist, Ralph Farris), July 21 (for cellist, Dorothy Lawson), and July 26 (for violinist, Mary Rowell).

And before I go, I just want to mention that I’ve had a chance to listen to Cornelius’ new CD, Dream Streets, which you can find on iTunes or Amazon, and is well worth spending some time with. If you are into the whole amplified-violin-looping-thing then you’ll love this recording. He has an original voice in this genre and I really love that when I’m done listening I don’t feel like he was just showing off or trying to impress someone.

by James Holt
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Hilary Hahn, Interviews, New Amsterdam, Violin

Hilary Hahn’s enquiring mind wants to know

Hilary Hahn doesn’t need much introduction; as one of the leading violinists today, many of you have any number of her recordings or have been lucky enough to catch her in concert.

Usually we put our stars up on some pedestal, always with that remove of the stage between us. But Hilary herself has a different idea of what a star should be up to in between wowing folks at those concerts. She happens to love to talk to people, especially other musicians, and is genuinely interested in what makes them tick. And she loves to share what she hears with us, often using her own trusty laptop to record her interviews. As she says: “Through interviewing, I find out things about people which would never come up in casual conversation: how they work, what their creative processes are, how they view their artistic output, what they value in their professions, and so on. To me, those topics are fascinating.”

Hilary was especially interested in doing a whole series of interviews with contemporary composers; since that’s what s21’s all about we thought “why not hook up?” So here’s the deal: each month Hilary will be visiting with a different composer, posting the interview to her YouTube channel.  We’ll let you know as soon as each goes up, give you the first part here and guide you to the place to view the rest. We’re really happy to work with Hilary, and to bring a bit of “real people” to the sometimes too-serious perception of our “art”.

First up, Hilary paid a visit to Judd Greenstein, a composer who’s not only been getting a lot of acclaim for his music, but is also one of the founding forces behind the exciting, young and extremely buzz-worthy New Amsterdam recording label. Hilary and Judd discuss self-presenting, artist-driven labels and the indie classical scene:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm42bhkvTEc[/youtube]

For the rest just head on over to Hilary’s YouTube channel.

by Steve Layton
Bass, Cello, Concerts, Experimental Music, Improv, jazz, Percussion, San Francisco, Violin

Rova Saxophone Quartet and friends channel Buckminster Fuller

Rova Saxophone QuartetSan Francisco is famous for its innovations, its open minds, and its spirit of protest.  In 2005, according to Rova Saxophone Quartet member Larry Ochs, “our government was committing all sorts of crimes against humanity in all of our names. I wanted to create some art that flew in the face of those acts – but not overtly political because that’s not what we do.”

Rova dreamed up an international collaborative work in honor of the visionary genius of Buckminster Fuller and his “Spaceship Earth” global perspective.  “Good works by people brought together from different countries – if only to point out that it was possible for people to meet for the very first time and in a week of collaboration, create something positive for the spirit, and something that was more than any one of the collaborators could create on his/her own,” Ochs explains.  Berlin-based multimedia artist Lillevan, Swedish-born percussionist Kjell Nordeson, Canadian contrabassist Lisle Ellis, cellist and Kronos Quartet alumna Joan Jeanrenaud, and violinist rock star Carla Kihlstedt make up the international dream team that will join Rova in presenting Fissures, Fixtures: for Buckminster Fuller.

The set of pieces combines live music and digital animation in a continuous feedback loop, with the music influencing the creation of the film in real time, and the film images inspiring the music.  Improvisation, as Larry Ochs declares, will ensure that the piece transcends the individuals involved and becomes more than the sum of its parts.  Rova and friends offer up the piece to honor “someone who over 40 years ago was stating categorically that mankind had to find a way to work together to create a one world-system that benefitted everyone.”

Since both performances will be recorded for future DVD release, this is your chance to immortalize your own applause for contemporary music posterity.  The concert happens twice, on May 22 and 23 in Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco located at 3200 California Street.  Tickets are $24.00 general, $21.00 for JCCSF members, and $16.00 for students.  Get them online at www.jccsf.org, and by phone at (415) 292-1233.

by Polly Moller
CDs, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Music Instruments, Violin

Mutter Modern (An Interview with Anne-Sophie)

Anne-Sophie Mutter latest cdViolinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is continually creating something new – from concerti by Krzysztof Penderecki and Andre Previn to works by Sebastian Currier and Henri Dutilleux.

Mutter’s latest project is a recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Tempus Praesens, written in 2006-07 and premiered with the Berlin Philharmonic in August 2007. Selke Harten-Strehk has more background here on Mutter’s website.

I spoke with Mutter about the new concerto recording and about working with composers, and even if she composed herself. Listen to our conversation here.

That morning it was very difficult to get an international connection, and then about 10 minutes into our talk, the line went dead, and to my horror, it was another 3 minutes until I could connect again. (She now has my number as well, hahaha) Despite that, we had a great talk – this version (without our disconnect) also leaves out our talk about period bows (which she uses for the Bach concerti on the disc) as well as some talk about technology. You can hear the longer version over at ClassicallyHip.

I did leave out our talk about politics, which she was very interested in, and said Europe is watching the election closely.

Mutter performs very soon in New York City on October 13th, and you can find the rest of her schedule here. She’ll be back at Carnegie Hall in April 2009 to premiere a Piano Trio by Previn with Lynn Harrell, and a celebration of Previn’s 80th birthday with the orchestra of St, Luke’s including his Violin Concerto and a Concerto for Violin and Viola.

by John Clare
CDs, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Orchestral, Piano, Violin

Anders Koppel: Festivity back in the concert hall

How does it sound – a double concerto written by a musician weaned on Beethoven, salsa, Stravinsky and Bulgarian folk music? In short – like nothing else!

The Danish composer Anders Koppel (b. 1947) is himself. “My music consists of the life I have lived,” is as close as he gets to a definition of his style.

Anders Koppel grew up with music all day long. His father, Herman D. Koppel, was one of Denmark’s leading composers and pianists, and worked in the living room at home. Anders and his siblings were eye-witnesses to all aspects of the musical creative process and got to know about the smallest components of music. As adults all four became some of the most prominent Danish musicians.

The key words for Anders’ music are energy, collectivity and festivity. After one of the most versatile careers in Danish music, which still includes intense improvisations on Hammond organ, Anders Koppel is now concentrating on writing classical solo concertos. He has written over 20 since the mid-1990s, most recently also a couple of double concertos.

On two CDs from Dacapo you can hear Anders’ mixture of vital energy and classical forms. On one CD his son Benjamin is the soloist in his Saxophone Concertos 1 and 2, and on the other you can hear Anders Koppel’s double concertos: one is for violin and accordion with a definite touch of tango. The other is for saxophone and piano and drags Beethoven along to a nightclub. There are inserted improvisations that give the music freedom and personality – a good indication of the attitude of this congenial composer, who was one of Denmark’s best known hippies in the 1960s and is still a passionate representative of breadth of taste and a zest for life.

by Jens Cornelius
CDs, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Orchestral, Violin

Marvin Does Hovhaness

Marvin Rosen’s Classical Discoveries program is a  special one this week involving, as it does, several members of the S21 community.  Marvin’s doing the first radio broadcast of OgreOgress’s world premiere recording of Alan Hovhaness’s Janabar, a 37-minute Sinfonia Concertante for Piano, Trumpet, Violin & Strings.  The recording features Christina Fong on violin, Paul Hersey on piano, and Michael Bowman on trumpet, with the Slovak Philharmonic, conducted by Rastislav Stur.

The piece is scheduled for Wednesday, July 18th during the 10am EST hour. The program, from Princeton, NJ, can be heard locally on 103.3 FM  or online.  Lots of details about the new recording here.

Also scheduled is the one hour Symphony No. 6, for chorus and orchestra by the Latvian composer, Imants Kalniņš in a recording produced by the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. That piece will air beginning at around 8:00 am EST.
 
Marvin is also doing a series of special summer programs of avant-garde music titled Classical Discoveries goes Avant-Garde, which is devoted to more modern works than one normally hears on his Wednesday morning Classical Discoveries program.  Classical Discoveries Goes Avant-Garde can be heard every Friday from 11:00 am until 3:00 pm on WPRB.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Violin

Social Media and the Contemporary Composer

For your dining and dancing pleasure–through the miracle of YouTube–Club Sequenza21 is delighted to present the talented violinist/composer Piotr Szewczyk performing short solo violin pieces by regulars Lawrence Dillon and Jeff Harrington, live and in color, as part of his Violin Futura program at Spoleto.  Roll ’em, Pete.

[youtube]xJGdeOUNokM [/youtube]

[youtube]z5yBrIFZIcs [/youtube] 

by Jerry Bowles