Composers, works, events

Hesperus by Bella in Budapest

28. marec 2021

In 2017, Máté Bella composed his work Hesperus for viola and ensemble. The work was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporaine and premiered on 16 February 2019 on French Radio. On May 18, Péter Bársony will be the soloist of the Hungarian premiere at the Budapest Music Center, the UMZE ensemble will be conducted by Gregory Vajda. We asked the composer on the occasion of this coming performance.

What kind of compositional ideas have you realized in Hesperus?

This piece is the third one in a series: First, Chuang Tzu’s Dream was written for cello and ensemble, then came Trance for violin and ensemble, and finally, Hesperus for viola and ensemble joined them. These compositions are actually concertos, and I am mainly interested in this genre to present the possibilities of the solo instrument as colourfully as possible. The ensemble draws a polyphonic background behind the solo instrument as if to display the shadow of the soloist, and at the same time, it acts as a kind of echo that takes over and transforms musical elements from the soloist.

Photo: VivienNaomi Photography

Was there any direct inspiration?

There were several: In 2016, I heard Mark Andre’s orchestral piece hij 1 in Switzerland: a huge apparatus on stage that sounded very softly all the time. I was strongly impressed by this sound and was looking for something similar in Hesperus. At the same time, as the title suggests, Hesperus seeks to evoke the flickering of the Evening Star, a visual impression, by acoustic means. It was also important to me that in darkness our ears are more sensitive to the noises of the environment, and that’s why I strived for a kind of silky sound and also for the piece to be very quiet all way long, except for a brief dynamic climax. I’ve long been concerned with transformation processes between noises and musical sounds. In Hesperus, we arrive at musical sounds from the noises and then back at the noises. My string orchestra piece Lethe is just going the other way round, from musical sounds to noises and back.

To what extent was the character of the work determined by the capabilities of the solo instrument?

Before writing the play, I consulted Péter Bársony, who will now be the main figure of the Hungarian premiere. I remember one of his first sentences was this: Remember that the viola is an alto instrument whose deep register, mostly its C-string, sounds beautiful, and it’s not good to fall into the fault of those who want to use the higher registers melodically. I took this warning and decided that I would use the higher registers mainly as harmonics. Accordingly, I designed the viola part so that during the piece it sinks from the high harmonics to the C-string and then rises high again. This arc contrasts the accompaniment’s way from noises to musical sounds and then back to noises.

György Kurtág at 95

15. februar 2021

Every note he writes is essential. There is never an idea of small talk. There is never an idea of wanting to please somebody or an audience. For him, there is only the truth, the essential, that you never can lie when you make music.” – That’s how Heinz Holliger recently summed up the life and work of his friend and fellow musician György Kurtág who soon turns 95. Holliger’s short, considered statements echo Kurtág’s notoriously aphoristic musical style.

You never come too late” – said Kurtág once, referring to his slow, meticulous working method. He dates his mature composer career from 1958 when after one year stay in Paris, he returned to his Hungarian isolation behind the iron curtain being aware of his task of life, and, as he put decades later, “that outward circumstance cannot influence what is now happening to me.

This more than sixty-year-old notion is valid even today since Kurtág follows unshakably his own path. The fame of his unique musicality as a composer and as a teacher first has been revealed only for a small circle of Hungarian enthusiast. Sayings of Péter Bornemisza remained unnoticed in Darmstadt in 1968. Not so the premiere of the Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova fifteen years later in Paris, recorded under the baton of Pierre Boulez. And since then the camp of the Kurtágians has gradually grown to uncountable. Even if the centre of his output is unalterable, the musical manifestations are astoundingly varied: from aethereal to vulgar, from gentle to cruel, from menacing to grotesque. The common feature in this whole spectrum is that the gestures always communicate in a direct and unambiguous manner.

As a copestone of seventy years of composing, Kurtág delivered his Beckett-opera, Fin de partie, that he finished after seven years of work. “The final masterpiece of twentieth-century music,” that’s how Axel Ross labelled it after the 2018 Milan premiere. The opera comprises an encyclopedia of Kurtágian gestures but it also represents a through-composed dramatic process of two hours.

Since this premiere Kurtág, the nonagenarian hasn’t stopped composing: new piano pieces, short vocal compositions leave his workshop regularly. UMP Editio Musica Budapest, his principal publisher for six decades now, celebrates his forthcoming 95th birthday with the release of 10th volume of Játékok (Games), that contains besides piano pieces written between 2002 and 2011 also a couple of compositions from the 1940s-1980s, giving an exceptional insight into Kurtág’s workshop in his earlier years.

Preparing new editions and revisiting old ones means a continual exchange with him, an exciting challenge and a constant learning process, both in a professional and personal sense. We wish him, and ourselves, and the entire music world that this relationship continue for a long time.

the UMP Editio Musica Budapest team

On the Centenary of András Szőllősy

26. januar 2021

"The third master" - his faithful monographer, János Kárpáti used this epithet on András Szőllősy who was born on February 27, 1921, a hundred years ago. He was the third beside György Ligeti and György Kurtág, who were all born in Transylvania in the 1920s, and then graduated from the Budapest Academy of Music - that is, he was the third behind his world-famous colleagues and friends.

Szőllősy’s oeuvre is thin, consisting of barely thirty compositions, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a few “autumn flowers” until 2002. The late start of the career is explained by the fact that although Szőllősy studied composition as a student of Zoltán Kodály, he felt more like a musicologist until the mid-1960s, collecting and editing the works and writings of his great predecessors, Béla Kodály and Bartók. (his Sz-numbers are still used to identify Bartók's works).

A fresh impetus for composing came at the commission of the renowned flautist Severino Gazzelloni in 1964 (Tre pezzi). It is rumoured that with this cycle, Szőllősy wanted to show his younger colleagues, enchanted by the avant-garde of Western Europe, that he also has an independent idea of ​​the modern tone. The real breakthrough was Concerto no. 3, for string orchestra, written in 1968, which was chosen as Distinguished Composition of the Year at the 1970 UNESCO Rostrum in Paris. Concerto No. 3 already carries the features of Szőllősy’s style of the following decades: a strict structure, a very precise notation that gives the impression of aleatory, but at the same time a retrained expression of an overall tragic worldview that appears in recurring intonations such as dirges, chorales, and bells, summoning the atmosphere of a funeral.

In the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to Hungarian orchestras, Szőllősy received commissions from renowned European institutions as the Dresdener Staatskapelle (Preludio, Adagio e Fuga), the BBC Wales (Canto autunno), the Dutch Ensemble M (Pro somno Igoris Stravinsy quieto) and the Berlin Biennale (Elegia). In the 1980s, vocal works brought a new colour, most notably compositions for King’s Singers, like Fabula Phaedri, a fine example of Szőllősy’s humour, and the touching Miserere.

His last works: two poignant funeral music, in memory of his youthful friend (Passacaglia Achatio Máthé in memoriam) and the always supportive musicologist-critic colleague (Addio: György Kroó in memoriam). As if Szőllősy himself were saying farewell in these compositions with the sound of string instruments, like decades before, when in Concerto No. 3 strings helped to find the composer’s own voice.

Listen to 1-hour music by András Szőllősy!

G. Ricordi & Co., New York sign visionary composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe to exclusive, global publishing deal

14. september 2020

Photo: Peter Serling

Los Angeles, September 14, 2020 — G. Ricordi & Co., New York, a Universal Music Publishing Classical company, today announced an exclusive global publishing agreement with innovative American composers and Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. Under the new agreement, Gordon, Lang and Wolfe’s esteemed catalogs are now represented worldwide by Ricordi and its international partners.

This signing is the first for G. Ricordi & Co., New York, the newest member of Universal Music Publishing Group’s classical publishing operation and the first one in North America, joining its offices in Milan, Paris, Berlin, London and Budapest.

The trio join Ricordi’s world-class roster of leading composers from the past several centuries including Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, Varèse, Nono, Battistelli, Francesconi, Haas, Neuwirth and Poppe. Additionally, Universal Music Publishing Classical boasts the Durand, Salabert, Eschig and Editio Musica Budapest catalogs, which feature celebrated international composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Milhaud, Poulenc, Messiaen, Dusapin, Kodály and Kurtág.

 “This is a defining moment for Ricordi and for the new-music landscape of North America, as Michael, David, and Julia are paradigm-shifting composers whose boundless creativity will continue to captivate audiences for generations to come,” said Jude Vaclavik, Director, US Publishing and Promotion for G. Ricordi & Co., New York. “We cherish this rare opportunity to join into a partnership with these iconic composers. It is an honor to be entrusted with their singularly important catalogs.”

Though their vision for the present and future of music is aligned, each composer contributes something unique to their collective musical tapestry. “Gordon is Bang’s resident experimentalist,” writes Alex Ross of The New Yorker, “drawn to densely roiling textures.”

Lang has become especially known for his music featuring voices, including a steadily growing catalog of innovative operatic works. Says Ross, “Anyone who clings to the prejudice that contemporary classical music is incapable of the most direct beauty should put down this magazine and go listen to the Theatre of Voices’ recording. If you never come back, I won’t blame you.”

William Robin of The New Yorker said, “Wolfe’s commitment to a pluralist populism—in both musical style and political content—may make her the most relevant Bang composer to the current moment. That democratic impulse also makes her an heir to the legacy of Aaron Copland, whose left-leaning politics guided his construction of an iconic American sound.”

MICHAEL GORDON

Michael Gordon is known for his monumental and immersive works. Gordon’s Decasia, for 55 retuned spatially positioned amplified instruments (that also serves as the soundtrack for Bill Morrison’s cult-classic film) has been featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox Festival and at the Southbank Centre’s Ether Festival. Gordon’s Timber, a tour-de-force for percussion sextet, played on amplified microtonal simantras, has been performed on every continent including by Slagwerk Den Haag at the Musikgebouw (Amsterdam), Mantra Percussion at BAM (New York), So Percussion at the Barbican (London), Ictus at MaerzMusik (Berlin), and live on NPR from a Lowe’s hardware store. Timber has been remixed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, Oneohtrix Point Never and Squarepusher.

Gordon’s work employs the placement of instruments in an environment to create an enveloping mesmerizing spectacle. Natural History, for 120 musicians and the drummers of the local Klamath tribe, was premiered on the rim of Crater Lake (Oregon) by conductor Teddy Abrams and is the subject of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature. Big Space, commissioned by the BBC Proms, premiered in the Royal Albert Hall with musicians surrounding the audience on all sides. Rushes, for 7 bassoons, was recently performed at the Park Avenue Armory (New York) and by the London Contemporary Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The City Symphonies trilogy—Gotham, for New York, Dystopia, for Los Angeles, and El Sol Caliente, for Miami Beach—join music with film by filmmaker Bill Morrison to capture the essence of their respective cities.

Gordon’s choral works include A Western, premiered at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices; Anonymous Man, an autobiographical choral work written for The Crossing, about Gordon’s own street and conversations with two homeless men who lived there. Operas include What to wear with the legendary New York theater director Richard Foreman and Acquanetta with iconoclastic director Daniel Fish.

Gordon’s works have been choreographed to by Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company, the Stuttgart, Zurich, Royal, Miami, Scottish ballet companies. Recent recordings include Clouded Yellow, Gordon’s complete string quartets performed by the Kronos Quartet.

DAVID LANG

David Lang is one of the most performed American composers writing today. He is acclaimed for his vocal music, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning the little match girl passion, and for his theatrical imagination, in his operas, in narrative music for dance and film, and in massive site-specific events and installations. He earned Golden Globe, Critics' Choice, and Academy Award nominations for his music for Paolo Sorrentino's film Youth. Most recently, Lang scored Paul Dano's directorial debut, Wildlife, as well as Patty Jenkins’s limited series I Am the Night.

Recent works include his opera prisoner of the state (with libretto by Lang) — premiered in 2019 by the New York Philharmonic, who co-commissioned the work along with Rotterdam's de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, Malmö Opera, and Bruges’s Concertgebouw; the writings, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Netherlands Kamerkoor, and premiered by Theatre of Voices; the mile-long opera, co-created with architect Elizabeth Diller and premiered in New York City's mile-long elevated park The Highline; the loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and for which Lang served as composer, librettist, and stage director; the public domain for 1,000 singers at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; his chamber opera anatomy theater at Los Angeles Opera and at the Prototype Festival in New York; the concerto man made for the ensemble So Percussion and a consortium of orchestras, including the BBC Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; mountain, commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony; death speaks, a song cycle based on Schubert, but performed by rock musicians, including Bryce Dessner from The National and Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond; the whisper opera, for the International Contemporary Ensemble and soprano Tony Arnold; and love fail, an evening-length work for the early music vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, with libretto and staging by Lang.

Lang is a Professor of Music Composition at the Yale School of Music and is Artist in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

JULIA WOLFE

Julia Wolfe’s music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. The 2019 world premiere of Fire in my mouth, a large-scale work for orchestra and women's chorus, by the New York Philharmonic with The Crossing and the Young People's Chorus of New York City, received extensive acclaim — one reviewer called the work "a monumental achievement in high musical drama, among the most commandingly imaginative and emotively potent works of any kind that I've ever experienced." (The Nation Magazine)

The premiere recording of Fire in my mouth was released on Decca Gold and received two Grammy nominations (best contemporary classical composition; best engineered classical album). The work is the third in a series of compositions about the American worker: 2009’s Steel Hammer, which examines the folk-hero John Henry, and the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Anthracite Fields, a concert-length oratorio for chorus and instruments, which draws on oral histories, interviews, speeches, and more to honor the people who persevered and endured in the Pennsylvania Anthracite coal region. Mark Swed of the LA Times wrote Anthracite Fields, "captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost...but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost. The music compels without overstatement. This is a major, profound work."

Wolfe has written a major body of work for strings, from quartets to full orchestra. Her music has been heard at venues throughout the world and has been recorded on Argo, Cantaloupe Music, Decca Gold, Point/Universal, Sony Classical, and Teldec.

In addition to receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2015, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music, and was named Musical America's 2019 Composer of the Year. She is on faculty at The Steinhardt School at New York University.

About Universal Music Publishing Group

Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) is a leading global music publisher with 48 offices in 46 countries. Headquartered in Los Angeles, UMPG represents music across every genre from some of the world’s most important songwriters and catalogs. These include ABBA, Adele, Jhené Aiko, Alabama Shakes, Alex Da Kid, Axwell & Ingrosso, J Balvin, Bastille, Beach Boys, Beastie Boys, Bee Gees, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Jeff Bhasker, Justin Bieber, Benny Blanco, Chris Brown, Kane Brown, Mariah Carey, Michael Chabon, Kenny Chesney, Desmond Child, The Clash, Coldplay, J. Cole, Elvis Costello, DaBaby, Jason Derulo, Alexandre Desplat, Neil Diamond, Disclosure, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, Danny Elfman, Eminem, Gloria and Emilio Estefan, Florence + the Machine, Future, Martin Garrix, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Al Green, Halsey, Emile Haynie, Jimi Hendrix, Don Henley, Hit-Boy, Sam Hunt, Imagine Dragons, Carly Rae Jepsen, Tobias Jesso Jr., Billy Joel, Elton John/Bernie Taupin, Joe Jonas, Nick Jonas, Alicia Keys, Lil Baby, Lil Yachty, Linkin Park, Logic, Demi Lovato, the Mamas & the Papas, Steve Mac, Maroon 5, Dave Matthews, Shawn Mendes, Metallica, Metro Boomin, Miguel, Nicki Minaj, Stephan Moccio, Maren Morris, Mumford & Sons, Randy Newman, New Order, Ne-Yo, Pearl Jam, Post Malone, Quavo, Otis Redding, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rex Orange County, Rosalía, Carole Bayer Sager, Gustavo Santaolalla, Sex Pistols, Carly Simon, Paul Simon, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Stax (East Memphis Music), Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, SZA, Shania Twain, Justin Timberlake, U2, Keith Urban, Troy Verges, Jack White, Zedd and many more.

 

Arranging Kurtág – An Interview with Olivier Cuendet

06. maj 2020

The renowned Swiss composer-conductor Olivier Cuendet has been working with György Kurtág for more than twenty years. One of the fruits of this cooperation, an ensemble version of …concertante…, was premiered on January 16, 2020, in Amsterdam with Asko | Schönberg Ensemble and was repeated in Washington D. C. two weeks later. Plans for a recording of Cuendet’s arrangement of Zwiegespräch for synthesizer and orchestra, and a premiere of a percussion version are also on the schedule.

How did you get acquainted with Kurtág’s music? What were its characteristics that most affected you?

Some 25 years ago I scheduled Grabstein für Stephan with the Kammerorchester Basel and, due to a common friend, I could work with Kurtág for the first time, as he assisted to some rehearsals and one concert. We understood each other very well from the first moment on, and he liked my way of performing Haydn! His deep roots in classical music and his natural and unique way to combine this heritage with atonality, together with his most innovative technique of composing are the most fascinating sides of Kurtág’s music for me. Another point is the extreme expressivity and organicity of each phrase and each piece he composes: there is no single note that doesn’t speak or tell something in his whole oeuvre! 

Cuendet and Kurtág at a rehearsal in 2010 (Photo: Laurent Thion)

You’ve arranged three compositions by Kurtág for ensemble up till now: in two cases your arrangements are expansions of the original (Zwiegespräch and Games), the third one is a reduction (…concertante…). Why did you choose these works?

I can’t say that I chose these works, rather they chose me! When I discovered for myself Kurtág’s unique method of constantly reworking his previous compositions and producing new works out of older pieces, especially out of his piano music Játékok (Games), I asked him if I could try to make my own instrumental versions of some of his piano pieces with different technics and improvisation. I tried it with my ensemBle baBel and we performed it also in Budapest. After this first, mostly improvised attempt, he encouraged me to fix some of them into a score: the result was very far from improvisation but it kept the idea of ‘games’ from his Games (Játékok). In the meantime, György Kurtág Jr asked me if I could try to arrange Zwiegespräch and later …concertante… . Both works represent great music but suffered from balance problems: in Zwiegespräch between the string quartet and synthesiser, in …concertante… between the two soloists and a very large symphony orchestra. The challenge was to give the right space to the music and also to reorganise the musical material (Zwiegespräch) or to simplify it (…concertante…). 

In the case of Zwiegespräch, you did not only prepare an instrumentation but a completely new arrangement using percussion instead of a synthesizer; this version is planned to be premiered at Luzern Festival. How did you come to this new version?

György Kurtág Jr’s contribution to Zwiegespräch, the synthesizer part, is partly pre-recorded and partly played live and no score exists for it. So nobody else can perform it but he himself. Therefore, I suggested replacing the synthesiser by a solo percussionist who would create a new dialogue with the orchestra. The idea is not to imitate the sounds of the synthesiser by percussion, but to transpose the musical intentions, the structure and the poetic of the music of Kurtág Jr that dialogues with his father’s music into another world of sounds. As the music of the son is not always fixed and can change from one performance to another, I gave the percussion soloist a lot of space for improvisation with certain rules and within a fixed structure. Thus, Zwiegespräch, a dialogue between father and son, could be extended to a dialogue between a solo performer and a full orchestra and also between written and improvised music.

What were your models by finding the sonority of Kurtágian ensemble music?

This is a delicate question. My first reaction was, of course, to study Kurtág’s instrumental work – I had conducted most of his orchestral and ensemble pieces –, and they are indeed a treasury of instrumentation! But Kurtág himself asked me for being less respectful and not to imitate his instrumental language, so, he wanted me to be impertinent, finding other sonorities and “correcting” what he had written. I could mention Les Noces by Stravinsky, popular music with accordion, Varèse or Stockhausen as my inspirations. But I tried mostly to forget the original and to find the best way and colour for each phrase, chord, and section of these works. 

How could you work together with Kurtág?

Our work together has always been based on mutual trust and understanding; I have learned so much from many discussions and rehearsals with him, not only about his works but about music in general! Sometimes I send him pages of my arrangement and he makes comments, or I call him to ask a question. But the best way has always been to work directly with him, discussing the scores and recordings of the performances; it isn’t always easy because it is sometimes difficult to separate the problem due to the interpretation, to the recording and of the orchestration. He has always been extremely demanding, but first of all towards himself, criticising his own composition; he can very well say something one day and the contrary the next day; the problem is that he is right both times and you have to take a decision!

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