Wie sich ein Amerikaner scheckig freut über neue Oper von #OlgaNeuwirth und #ElfrideJelinek. Mit #Godzilla 😍
Merci #HamburgischeStaatsoper für »Monsters Paradise«. Bitte irgendwie auch via #ArteDE oder Home-Media verwerten.

https://youtu.be/zHSheOnYqZ8

Van Han-Na Chang tot Marie Jaëll, Olga Neuwirth en meer

Ik heb mijn blog schandelijk verwaarloosd de afgelopen periode, het was een beetje druk….

Op 9 mei kwam mijn vriend Huang Ruo weer naar Amsterdam, voor het tweede deel van zijn verblijf op uitnodiging van het Concertgebouw, waar hij dit seizoen huiscomponist is. We gingen samen naar een uitvoering van Don Giovanni van Mozart in de Stopera. De regie viel helaas niet mee… Een maand later sprak ik Huang Ruo voor het coverartikel van het oktobernummer van Preludium. Die maand speelt het Carducci Quartet het voor hen gecomponeerde strijkkwartet The Flag Project.

Huang Ruo + Thea Derks, Stadskantine A’dam 6-6-2016

Voor Cultuurpers deed ik een interview met de Koreaans-Amerikaanse cellist/dirigent Han-Na Chang. Zij maakte haar Nederlandse dirigentendebuut met het Noord Nederlands Orkest, waarmee zij het Eerste Pianoconcert van Tsjaikovski uitvoerde, met Nelson Goerner aan de piano. Na de pauze stond de Tiende Symfonie van Sjostakovitsj op het programma.

Chang is een interessante, frisse vrouw, die de musici zelfverzekerd en met veel elan door de muziek voerde. Ik bezocht het concert op 27 mei in het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam en werd getroffen door het hoge niveau van de uitvoering.  Na afloop: op de foto!

Han-Na Chang + Thea Derks Concertgebouw 27-5-2016 NNO

Een week eerder, op 15 mei, overleed de Nederlandse componist Bernard van Beurden. Een charmante en enthousiasmerende persoonlijkheid, die zich zijn leven lang inzette voor amateurmuziek. Hij schreef aansprekende stukken, waarin hij niet op de hurken ging maar veel van de musici vergde. Maar nooit té veel, hij wist hen te overtuigen ook de moeilijkere noten met vuur te verdedigen. Ik schreef een in memoriam voor Cultuurpers. Als eerbetoon draaide ik in Panorama de Leeuw XX zijn Mis voor sopraan, accordeon, cello en harmonieorkest uit 1989.

Donderdag 19 mei verzorgde ik de inleiding bij het concert ‘Chopin in Bohemen’ van Amsterdam Sinfonietta in TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht. Op het programma stond – uiteraard – het Tweede Pianoconcert van Chopin, met Khatia Buniatishvili aan de piano. De overige componisten waren Tsjechen: Antonín Dvorák, Erwin Schulhoff en Pavel Haas. Ik sprak o.a. met de – Hongaarse! – cellist Ors Kószeghy.

Ors Köszeghy + Thea Derks TivoliVredenburg 19-5-2016

Zondag 29 mei was ik bij een concert in Museum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo, georganiseerd door 401 Nederlandse Opera’s, een organisatie die zich inzet voor vergeten Nederlands operarepertoire. Er werd een hele reeks onbekende aria’s en duetten uitgevoerd, gelardeerd met enkele instrumentale intermezzi. Ik schreef een bespreking voor Cultuurpers.

De hele maand mei luisterde ik met veel plezier naar de muziek van Marie Jaëll, een Franse pianist en componist die geweldige muziek componeerde, waarin ze haar tijd vaak ver vooruit was. Heel fijn dat Palazzetto Bru-Zane nu een boekje met daarin drie cd’s heeft uitgebracht, met uitmuntende uitvoeringen. Dat laat bij vrouwelijke componisten nogal eens te wensen over helaas. Kortom, voorbeeldig, zoals te lezen in mijn recensie. Jaëll is voor mij een grote ontdekking, die veel meer bekendheid zou moeten krijgen.

Marie Jaëll

Op 31 mei sprak ik uitgebreid met Louis Andriessen, jarenlange kompaan van Reinbert de Leeuw, die ook zijn nieuwste opera, Theatre of the World in première bracht. Plaats van handeling was Los Angeles, maar aangezien het een coproductie betrof met het Holland Festival, werd zijn opera ook in Nederland uitgevoerd, in Theater Carré. Het – behoorlijk onnavolgbare – libretto is geïnspireerd op de laatste levensuren van de Jezuïtische wetenschapper Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680). Ons gesprek was er niet minder geanimeerd om. En de muziek was mooi en zeer afwisselend.

Thea Derks + Louis Andriessen 31-5-2016

Vanwege het Holland Festival zit de agenda deze maand sowieso stevig vol. Op 9 juni speelde London Sinfonietta de double-bill The Cure/The Corridor van Harrison Birtwistle in het Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. Ik schreef een voorbeschouwing en trof na afloop de altviolist Paul Silverthorne, met wie ik enkele malen een nieuwemuziekfestival in Odessa had bezocht. Tot mijn verrassing was ook Birtwistle zelf aanwezig, die ik in het verleden vaker heb geïnterviewd. We gingen samen met dirigent Geoffrey Paterson op de foto.

Geoffrey Paterson – Harry Birtwistle – Thea Derks MGIJ 9 June 2016

Een dag later deed ik de inleiding bij de Nederlandse première van Oh komm, Heiliger Geist voor koor, orkest, bas en sopraan van Sofia Goebaidoelina. Een bijzonder werk, zoals eigenlijk al haar stukken. Meeslepend in zijn heftige geloofsbelijdenis, met een indrukwekkend stamelend koor, dat als het ware huivert voor de komst van de goddelijke genade. Ik maakte voor de live uitzending van het AVROTROS Vrijdoncert een reportage.

Woensdag 15 juni zat ik alweer in de Stopera, voor een uitvoering van Pique Dame van Tsjaikovski. Prachtige muziek, piekfijn uitgevoerd door het Koor van De Nationale Opera en het Koninklijk Concertgebouw o.l.v. Mariss Jansons. Jammer van de wonderlijke regie, waarin Tsjaikovski zelf als handelend personage werd opgevoerd. Dat is op zich nog niet zo erg, maar dat hij samenviel met Vorst Jeletski was buitengewoon verwarrend.

Focus componist van het Holland Festival was dit jaar Olga Neuwirth, de Oostenrijkse componist wier opera Bählamms Fest ik zeer bewonder. Die stond echter niet op het programma, wel drie andere stukken. Ik schreef alle toelichtingen en een muzikaal portret voor het Holland Festival.

Haar in de Gashouder uitgevoerde, avondvullende Le Encantadas viel een beetje tegen. Neuwirth wil er te veel inhoud in stoppen en blijft qua muzikaal idioom een beetje hangen in de vroegere avant-garde. Ook haar stuk Torsion voor fagot solo stond op de rol, tijdens een puntgaaf concert van de Franse meesterfagottist Pascal Gallois in het Bimhuis op zondag 19 juni. Klapper van de avond was Dialogue de l’ombre double van de eerder dit jaar overleden Pierre Boulez.

Joey Roukens na afloop van Morphic Waves, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, 20-6-2016

Last but not least bezocht ik maandag 20 juni een concert van het Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest in het Concertgebouw. Joey Roukens is dit seizoen hun huiscomponist en had een nieuw stuk gecomponeerd, Morphic Waves. Een zinderend werk, dat in grote golven de zaal overspoelde, maar af en toe tot rust kwam met lyrische en ingetogen soli van fluit, viool en andere instrumenten. Ik genoot van het uitbundige slagwerk, waarop ik vanaf mijn podiumplaats uitstekend zicht had.

Tussen de bedrijven door werk werk ik aan een toelichting bij Der nächtliche Wanderer van Reinbert de Leeuw, voor een concert in de vermaarde BBC Proms op 4 augustus.

#401NederlandseOperaS #AmsterdamSinfonietta #AthanasiusKircher #AVROTROSVrijdagconcert #BählammsFest #BernardVanBeurden #Concertgebouw #Cultuurpers #DeNationaleOpera #DonGiovanni #GeoffreyPaterson #HanNaChang #HarrisonBirtwistle #HollandFestival #HuangRuo #JoeyRoukens #KröllerMüller #LouisAndriessen #MarieJaëll #MorphicWaves #MuziekgebouwAanTIJ #NederlandsPhilharmonischOrkest #NelsonGoerner #NoordNederlandsOrkest #OlgaNeuwirth #OrsKöszeghy #PanoramaDeLeeuw #PascalGallois #PaulSilverthorne #PierreBoulez #PiqueDame #ReinbertDeLeeuw #Sjostakovitsj #SofiaGoebaidoelina #TheCorridorTheCure #TheaDerks #TheatreOfTheWorld #TivoliVredenburg

Why I hope to meet the twenty-something members of a reading club at the Dutch premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s soundtrack to ‘Die Stadt ohne Juden’

Die Stadt ohne Juden, British premiere 15 November 2018 (c) Mark Allan

‘If it happens once, it can happen again.’ These admonishing words from the Italian-Jewish concentration camp survivor Primo Levi are more topical than ever. Neo-Nazis in Germany shout Hitler’s slogans with impunity, in the Netherlands the largest political party (Forum voor Democratie) is openly racist and anti-immigration.

Fortunately there are still strongly dissenting voices, as illustrated by the soundtrack Olga Neuwirth composed to the film Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), that will be performed by Ensemble Klang on 13 February in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam.

It’s frightening that (neo)fascism is becoming more and more socially acceptable. Especially among young people, as I recently discovered during a concert of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. A reading club of twenty-somethings said they had enjoyed Percussion Concerto Nr.2 by James MacMillan.

They agreed with me on the disastrous effects of the continuous cuts in funding of the arts. But then they declared, totally unabashed: ‘We all vote for Thierry’ (leader of the above mentioned party). When I exclaimed in dismay that he hates anything that smacks even remotely of being non-Western or modern, they quickly made themselves scarce.

Plea for ‘useless art’

Five years ago someone stumbled on the the supposedly lost film Die Stadt ohne Juden by H.K. Breslauer from 1924 on a flea market in Paris. The Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (Graz, 1968) composed a new soundtrack to it, that was premiered in 2018 in Vienna. Christian Karlsen will conduct Ensemble Klang in its first run in Holland.

Olga Neuwirth has battled fascist tendencies in her homeland from the start. In 2000 she climbed the barricades to demonstrate against goverment participation of the right-wing extremist Jörg Haider. ‘Can I protest with art?’ she asked rhetorically. – Under the motto ‘Ich lass’ micht nicht wegjodeln’ (I won’t be yodelled away) she made a fierce plea for the power of ‘useless’ art.

Those who are willing to acknowledge that the artist is ‘a seeker, who wants to understand the Ordinary, curb the Dominant and investigate the Unknown, will be more open and tolerant towards their surroundings’. Her music is never coquettish, for Neuwirth does not compose ‘to lull the masses to sleep’, but wishes to exhort the listener to self-reflection. Instead of pleasant melodies and harmonies, we hear an abrasive soundworld, permeated with distorted fragments of classical masterpieces, pop and jazz. Often she also employs electronics.

Concrete shafts as a symbol for deported Jews

Nor does she deny her Jewish roots. In 2004 she composed Torsion for bassoon and ensemble. This was inspired by Daniel Libeskind’s design for the new annex of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The angular shape, reminiscent of a Star of David, emphasizes how inseparable Berlin is from the history of the Jews. Libeskind cleaved through his building with five voids. These empty concrete shafts symbolise the gaps caused by the Nazis’ Endlösungspolitik. Neuwirth makes those disappeared voices almost tangible by weaving sound recordings made in these abandoned shafts through her composition.

In 2014 she wrote a soundtrack to Alfred Machin’s silent anti-war film Maudite soit la guerre. Four years later she composed music for the rediscovered film Die Stadt ohne Juden by H.K. Breslauer. In it, the newly elected Austrian chancellor notices that anti-Semitism is well received by ‘the people’. – And decides to deport all Jews from Vienna. The film was based on the book of the same name by Hugo Bettauer from 1922. This was intended as a satire on the prevailing anti-Semitism but turned out to be a horrifyingly accurate vision of the near future.

Latent aggression in the glorification of national character

The restored film with Neuwirth’s soundtrack premiered in Vienna in 2018, receiving rave reviews. ‘It’s not just a silent film with music. From the very first moment, sound and image merge into a breathing organism,’ wrote the Hamburger Abendblatt. ‘During a service in the Synagogue, screaming sounds like distant complaining voices point forward to the gruesome future.’ The Tiroler Tagesblatt describes how Neuwirth makes ‘the fragility of the family bourgeois idyll’ musically palpable. Just like the ‘latent aggression of a glorified national character that can turn into violence at any moment’.

The British premiere was a success as well. Neuwirth was briefly interviewed beforehand. ‘One of the most powerful scenes is when the Jews walk out of the city at dusk’, she said.  While composing, ‘I had to suppress my anger. Otherwise the music would merely have been an expression of my repugnance’. Neuwirth points to the unmistakable parallels with our own time: ‘Toxic language unleashes hatred.’ Approvingly she quotes Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: ‘If it happens once, it can happen again’.

– I really hope to meet the young people from the reading club at the concert in Muziekgebouw…

The concert will be repeated at Korzo Theatre The Hague on 20 February.

#ChristianKarlsen #DieStadtOhneJuden #EnsembleKlang #HKBreslauer #MuziekgebouwAanTIJ #OlgaNeuwirth #TheCityWithoutJews

Olga Neuwirth wins both Grawemeyer Award and Ernst von Siemenspreis 2022

The Austrian politician Jörg Haider once labelled her work as Weltkatzenmusik (‘cat’s wailing music’). When his extreme right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs joined the government in 2000, this led to mass protests. At one such meeting, Olga Neuwirth (Graz, 1968), denounced his anti-intellectual and anti-cultural agenda under the slogan ‘Ich lass mich nicht wegjodeln’ (I won’t be yodelled away).

The rest is history: Haider crashed with his sports car in 2008, Neuwirth ranks as one of the most important composers of our time. This year she receives both the Grawemeyer Award and the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis 2022.

Neuwirth grew up in an artistic and progressive environment, with a well-known jazz pianist and piano teacher as father, a literary inspired woman as mother and an avant-garde composer as uncle. The home of her ‘hippie-like’ family was a coming and going of artists and musicians, including many Afro-American jazz greats. When she was twelve, she wrote a play about this, which was even performed in the school theatre.

Play with identities

All this sounds more idyllic than it was, because the downside of her parents’ freedom-loving mentality was that as a child she was ‘dragged everywhere and randomly put to sleep somewhere’, as she said in an interview in 2015. Moreover, her parents and their friends were constantly moving ‘on the brink of self-destruction’, so that as an adolescent she had the paradoxical feeling of having to save them from destruction. ‘You get to know a lot of human abysses in the process,’ she said in the same article.

From an early age, Olga Neuwirth has fearlessly pursued her own way. She dares to take a stand and to row against the tide, and teams up a lot with the controversial Austrian star author Elfride Jelinek; like this Nobel Prize winner, she fervently defends the women’s cause. That Neuwirth is socially committed, likes to take a closer look at our darkest motives and is fascinated by changing identities, seems almost self-evident.

Breakthrough opera Bählamms Fest

At the age of 22, she already overwhelmed the new-music audience with the mini-operas Der Wald and Körperliche Veränderungen, inspired by texts by Jelinek. The first is an indictment of environmental pollution, in which she introduces a forest as an acting character. In the black-comic Körperliche Veränderungen, the pomposity of men is ridiculed. Traditional authority relationships remain intact even after Tarzan and Jane have changed voices and roles.

In 1999, Neuwirth made her international breakthrough with her ‘animated opera’ Bählamms Fest, also based on a libretto by Jelinek, in which a family assault each other in a gruesome manner. The main character Theodora starts an affair with her brother-in-law, half-wolf, half-human. Her lover makes several bloody victims before abandoning her. That Theodora does not subsequently go mad, or throw herself off the cliff in despair, can be seen as Neuwirth’s middle finger to the usual opera practice.

Electronics and video

Like many of her peers, Neuwirth often works with electronics and video. One of her first projects was Canon of Funny Phases, which she made with her sister Flora in 1989. A one-minute animated film is shown on sixteen different video screens in immediate succession, like a strict musical canon. For the renowned Quay Brothers, she composed music for a Coca Cola commercial in 1993. After the company rejected it as ‘harmful to the youth’, the Brothers used it for their animated film The Calligrapher.

In 2003, Neuwirth attracted attention with her video opera Lost Highway, for which Jelinek again provided the text, based on the film of the same name by David Lynch. Five years later she composed Kloing! for pianist and interactive video, in which she intersperses existing (cartoon) film images with live shots from the stage. In this tragicomic piece, a pianist battles a computer that controls the keys of his instrument and eventually makes it impossible for him to play at all.

In Torsion for bassoon and pre-recorded material (also 2003), the performer is made to accompany field recordings. The piece was composed for the French bassoonist Patrick Gallois, and is inspired by the building Daniel Libeskind designed for the Jewish Museum in Berlin that opened in 2001. Five vertical concrete shafts symbolise the void created by the Nazis’ Endlösungspolitik. Neuwirth made sound recordings in these deserted spaces, which cut through the bassoonist’s dazzlingly virtuoso discourse five times.

Abrasive sound spectra

Neuwirth does not compose music ‘to lull the masses to sleep’. Instead of lyrical melodies and ear-pleasing harmonies, she concocts angular and abrasive sound spectra. She spices her music with distorted fragments from classical masterpieces, pop music and jazz. Besides (live) electronics, she employs electric guitars, toy instruments and ‘forgotten’ instruments such as harpsichord or theremin. Woodwind players produce ‘tooth tones’, glissandi and multiphonics; brass players don a huge range of mutes; string players use their fingernails. She often creates an alienating effect with microtonal sound fabrics.

Her research on the effect of sound on space lead to her ground-breaking Le Encantadas. Neuwirth completed this full-length work for six spatially arranged ensemble groups, samples and live electronics in 2015. It is named after Herman Melville’s novella of the same name, which comprises ten philosophical ‘sketches’ of the Galapagos archipelago, describing both their immense beauty and their desolate inhospitality.

https://youtu.be/dvtz8OzUXu8?feature=shared

Acoustic preservation

In search of the unfathomably deep sea, Neuwirth went to Venice, where at the age of 16 she had heard the premiere of the opera Prometeo by Luigi Nono in the Chiesia di San Lorenzo. This ‘tragedy of listening’ made an indelible impression. When she accidentally entered the church in 1997, she was so struck by its special acoustics that she decided to preserve it. She  recorded its acoustic relationships into a computer programme, thus enabling their exact reproduction in other spaces.

In Le Encantadas we make an imaginary journey along various islands. The acoustics are manipulated in such a way that sometimes we seem to find ourselves to be in the immense space of San Lorenzo, at other times in a narrow back room. Neuwirth intersperses the music with recordings of splashing water, ringing church bells, talking people and even an aria by the Japanese cyber diva Hatsune Miku. Its premiere in the Donaueschinger Musiktagen in 2016 was greeted with rave reviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfJO3ZFtaW0

Orlando

In 2019 Neuwirth and librettist Catherine Filloux based the opera Orlando on Virginia Woolf’s classic novel of the same name, published in 1928. In this ‘fictional musical biography’ the nobleman Orlando from Elizabethan times wakes up as a woman after a long slumber, living on into the 20th century. In spite of this sex change he/she remains unchanged in character, without ageing significantly. Neuwirth’s Orlando continues the story into 2019.

The writer Orlando falls in love with a woman during the hippie era and becomes acquainted with current phenomena such as the new right-wing movements. At the centre of the composition is the paraphrase: renaissance madrigals are washed over by swirling glissandi, out-of-tune harpsichords are crossed with sounds from such unlikely sources as car brakes and thunder plates. Thus Neuwirth creates new music from historical or historically inspired material.

Grawemeyer Award and Ernst von Siemenspreis

Orlando was the first opera ever to be staged in the 150-year history of the Vienna Opera House. It received great critical acclaim and won her the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, comprising $100,000. Neuwirth was also awarded this year’s Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis, which even amounts to € 250,000.

In a statement the Von Siemens Foundation calls her ‘one of the most influential composers of her time, who propagates feminist themes, breaks new ground, is not afraid to address grievances and gives contemporary music a new face’. Neuwirth described the main character Orlando as a person ‘who refuses to be patronized and treated in a condescending manner’ – an apt description of herself. She added that this is the everyday experience of women ‘with no end in sight’.

Neuwirth being awarded two such prestigious prizes in one and the same year may seem to indicate that the times they are a-changing…

Liked my article? A donation, however small, is welcome through PayPal (friends option avoids charges), or by transferring money to my bank account: T. Derks, Amsterdam, NL82 INGB 0004 2616 94. Many thanks!

#BählammsFest #ErnstVonSiemenspreis #GrawemeyerAward #LeEncantadas #OlgaNeuwirth

Olga Neuwirth -- ....miramondo multiplo... -- Håkan Hardenberger, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra conducted by Alan Gilbert

https://youtu.be/0DZPHhz8z28?si=1IX0qaT7oblj7k0_

Here's a trumpet concerto by Olga Neuwirth, an Austrian contemporary classical composer.

It's divided into five movements or arias, and is full of references to other pieces of music by Bach, Mahler, Miles Davis...I picked up a couple of those but missed many more, I'm sure. I wonder if a work of art that plays off or refers to another work or works fails in some respects if it cannot also stand on its own for the uniformed listener, viewer, or reader. Think, for example, of Picasso's 1954/55 series of paintings and drawings "Les Femmes d'Alger", which draws on Delacroix's " Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement". I'm sure there have been viewers who have enjoyed looking at the former without being aware of the source that inspired Picasso - and there is nothing wrong with that, even if other more informed viwers have a ricer experience.!

I've listened to the piece three times and I'm not sure if I like it that much - with the exception of the fourth aria, which is lyrical,magical and otherworldly, without falling into beauty spa music cheesiness. That movement starts at 11:37 and could be a stand alone piece.

#ClassicalMusic #ContemporaryMusic #OlgaNeuwirth #WomenComposers
#AustrianMusic

@classicalmusic
@womencomposers
@contemporarymusic

#OlgaNeuwirth b. 1968

Trurl-Tichy-Tinkle (2016)

#RobertFleitz #Piano

#musik #music #musique #musica #Neuwirth #contemporarymusic #classicalmusic #womencomposers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58sLOukUjxQ

@classicalmusic
@womencomposers
@contemporarymusic

#OlgaNeuwirth b. 1968

Masaot/Clocks without Hands (2013/15)

#KonzerthausorchesterBerlin
#PeterRundel

#musik #music #musique #musica #Neuwirth #contemporarymusic #womencomposers
#classicalmusic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BlnU8glrf8

@classicalmusic @womencomposers
@contemporarymusic

#OlgaNeuwirth b. 1968

'Eleanor', for blues singer, drum kit, e-guitar and ensemble (2014/15)

#DellaMiles #BluesSinger
#TyshawnSorey #Drums
#ChristelleSéry #EGuitar

#Ensembleintercontemporain
#MatthiasPintscher

#musik #music #musique #musica #Neuwirth #classicalmusic #contemporarymusic #womencomposers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmLuEeNAEvg

@classicalmusic @womencomposers
@contemporarymusic

#OlgaNeuwirth b. 1968

'Coronation I: Io Son Ferito Ahimè (2020)

#OlgaNeuwirth #Percussion

#KlangforumWien · #BjörnWilker

#musik #music #musique #musica #Neuwirth #contemporarymusic #womencomposers
#classicalmusic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MittomjSJ3o