By way of explaining why he couldn't watch Operalia 2013 live on Sunday, Charlie Cockey broached the subject of "New Music-Europe," pointing to the Janácek Philharmonic concert in Ostrava he was attending while young singers were vying for ranking in Verona. (Operalia results in the next item; for Charlie and all of those who missed Operalia live, check the Medici.tv podcast.)
The Ostrava concert's program, of one world premiere, two European and two Czech premieres:
Carola Bauckholt, Helicopter (2001-02)
Ravi Kittappa, exordium (2013)
Kaija Saariaho, Graal théâtre (1994)
Yangzhi Ma, A Beginning or an Ending (2011)
Christian Wolff, Individual, Collective (2012)
Charlie's report in part:
The opening piece, Helicopter, featured Dutch voice artist Jaap Blonk (listed in the program as "sound poet"), doing advanced and at times quite red-faced avant-garde vocal calisthenics that would have Joan La Barbara saying "He da man, he da man!" as the orchestra slowly spiraled from growling bass notes (rotors starting?) to ever higher realms, and beyond.Christian Wolff's Individual, Collective, a self-proclaimed "patchwork" with a Bachian reference midway, was for me far too fragmented for far too long. Concluding the evening was Kaija Saariaho's always gripping and ever-so-slightly formidable Graal théâtre, written in 1994 for Gidon Kremer, and performed here by Hana Kotková to thunderous applause. It's a helluva piece, surging with tension and energy, and wonderfully focused for all that it lasts 25 minutes.
The same outfit last week had this concert (I wonder how it would sell in our neck of the woods):
The pieces of exceptional duration are the motive of this year. After the more than five-hour-long concert of Philip Glass there will be the composition "Many Many Women" by Petr Kotik based on the text by Gertrude Stein performed by S.E.M. Ensemble (6 players and 6 vocalists). The evening (Aug. 23 from 6 p.m.) will not include any intermissions, however you can freely leave and come back. You can also just lie down and listen. Petr Kotik will personally reward everyone who stays until the end with a CD of Many Many Women and his autograph.
On Saturday, Charlie was on the other side of the Czech-Polish border, in Krakow, and a concert by the Norwegian string quartet Cikada:
It started with a Cikada-collage comprised of an unbroken journey through connected bits of Bach's Art of the Fugue; a snippet of a Lutoslawski quartet, obviously one of his sustained aleatoric sequences, that they used to move from traditional on-stage configuration to the room's four corners.Then String Quartet #5 by Georg Friedrich Haas (2007), very worth hearing and equally difficult to discuss, as it wasn't musical notes so much as an ongoing dialogue that at times resembled a battle between sustained sounds whose surging dynamics ranged from calming to screeching versus bitter attacking invasions of dissonant flurried notes that sliced through the sonic fabric otherwise established, the whole ending in a cascading rush of rapidly ascending lines from all four corners.
Somehow they got back to the stage, I don't know how, where they played Evind Buene's City Silence, the segue easy to spot by the fact that everybody put on their mutes; and finally, a lovely repose reached as they slid seamlessly into the first and fourth parts of John Cage's string quartet, which, with its gentle dancer's rhythms and generally open sounds (albeit here as well with the occasional intrusive dissonant punctuation-intrusions, this combination of gestures being the evening's apparent overall motif) was a lovely place to end.
After this journey, the second half featured Penderecki's 1960 string quartet, just as much silly (exploratory to be sure) fun as it ever was; Elliot Carter's Two Fragments, for me the evening's highlight, a piece that also featured contrasts between sustained notes and flurries, the latter in typical Carterian fashion flitting between colloquy, conversation, confrontation and outright contretemps; and finally another selection from Art of the Fugue to bring the evening both back where it started and yet somewhere else. You can always count on Cikada for wonderful music.