Six composers, six pieces, sixty-six years, but nothing diabolical. In fact, several aspects of the season’s only performance to be hosted at the BMC will direct the audience’s gaze skywards towards the heavens. We may rightfully label the evening a contemporary concert, although only one of the pieces on the program, featuring works composed between 1940 and 2006, was written… more
Tōru Takemitsu: Rain Spell
Joan Tower: Copperwave
Sofia Gubaidulina: Meditation on a Bach Chorale, “Vor deinen Thron tret Ich hiermit” (BWV 668)
György Ligeti: Six Bagatelles
John Cage: Living Room Music
Guillaume Connesson: Sextet
The BFO’s musicians will present composers, both legendary and lesser-known, who stood up to resistance encountered in their time, stuck to their innovative visions and produced oeuvres which have found their ways to the hearts not only of other professionals, but also audiences. The works incorporate a diverse range of formations, unique sounds and exciting back stories, with themes covering rain, copper, Bach, economizing on musical notes, essentially “anything” and the new year.
Water is one of the key motifs in the art of Japanese Tōru Takemitsu, as he interprets the water cycle of the world as a fluid process. Rain Spell, which employs fluid and mysterious music, places the colorful and magical phenomenon of rain at its center, with the help of the sounds and silences of the flute, the clarinet, the harp, the piano and the vibraphone.
“My father was a geologist and mining engineer,” Joan Tower has said, describing her attraction to minerals and stones. She has composed music about topaz and silver; and her 2006 piece, Copperwave, spotlights heavy, soft copper – naturally enough, on the brass winds. The Latin motifs of the piece evoke the years Tower spent in Bolivia as a child.
Mentored by Shostakovich and blacklisted by the Soviet Union, she was even more driven to be liberated through her art. Sofia Gubaidulina drew inspiration from so many quarters; her main role model was nonetheless Bach. It was shortly before he passed away that Bach worked on the slow choral theme which appears in Gubaidulina’s work, representing the Baroque master’s ascent to heaven using string instruments and the harpsichord.
Of the twelve bagatelles he composed earlier for the piano, Ligeti arranged six for a wind quintet in 1953. The movements exude “imaginary folklore” and “limping folk music.” The short, succinct bagatelles, using only few notes, feature dissonant, cool, moving, wild and passionate music, and even funeral music paying tribute to Bartók.
John Cage was able to turn literally anything into music. His piece Living Room Music, for four performers, was intended to be performed using any household object, and can thus be played even in the living room. The polyrhythmic first movement is followed by a prose part for the phrase, “once upon a time;” then, after a melodious movement, downright pleasant rhythms serve as the ending.
Paris was home to a special New Year’s concert on January 4, 1998, featuring Guillaume Connesson’s sextet in three movements, a truly entertaining and humorous piece. Following the variation movement Dynamique, evoking American repetitive music, a calm nighttime part (Nocturne) follows, featuring a clarinet solo; the piece concludes with a festival atmosphere including fireworks.
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