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editio Musica

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new insights into our classical catalogs, contemporary composers and the music scene. umpc: giving music a universal perspective

2

Table of conTenTs

Foreword.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

ensembles: AT The heArT oF modern music .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

“i Feel preTTy much Alone in This”. László Tihanyi and his music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

oriGinAliTy And chArAcTer. Maverick Composers giving essential new impetus to music l i fe:

An Excursion through the catalogs of Ricordi Munich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

operA: An ArT Form oF TodAy. An interview with Peter de Caluwe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

The ForTunATe converGence oF Two musicAl worlds. An interview with Ferenc Jávori,

leader of the Budapest Klezmer Band . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

umpc new siGninGs in 2012 (Francesca Verunell i , Samy Moussa, Adam Schoenberg) . . . . . . . . . . . . .34

A new wAve in iTAliAn operA ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38

operAs For younG Audiences .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

vision, innovATion And chAllenGe. An interview with Southbank Centre’s Gil l ian Moore . . . . . .46

“whAT remAins is music”- György Kurtág and Samuel Beckett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50

GiovAnni simone mAyr (1763-1845): Historical-crit ical edit ion of the complete works . . . . . . . . . . . . .54

spAnish conTemporAry music surGes AheAd ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58

encore: Composers committed to the defence of Authors’ r ights.

An interview with Laurent Petitgirard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60

2013 world premieres .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62

3

The year 2012 has been tumultuous for the music publishing and

record industries and the future probably will not be much different.

In an age of acquisitions and mergers and an ever-changing landscape

of new products and technologies, continuity and stability become

invaluable qualities.

This is particularly true for composers, who must use all their time

and energy for their creative output, and who need to be able to rely on

their publisher to promote their works, produce their scores, and dis-

tribute their sheet music through sales and rentals in a well-informed

and educated manner based on years of experience.

This is what the houses of Universal Music Publishing Classical have

been doing for the past 200 years and this is why excellent composers

from around the world feel well taken care of within the UMPC family,

and new composers are eager to join. We are particularly proud of our

new signings (see page 34) and of the new works with which our estab-

lished composers are entrusting us.

We are happy to share once again with you some of their key activi-

ties in some depth. Following current trends and interests, we have

included articles on operas for young audiences (page 42), Klezmer

music (page 30), and music theatre (pages 26 & 38). We hope these

stories make you feel engaged and inspired to explore further these

topics and composers.

Antal Boronkay, General Manager, Managing Director, Editio Musica Budapest

Silke Hilger, International Promotion Director, UMP Classical

Cristiano Ostinelli, General Manager, Casa Ricordi, Milan

Reinhold Quandt, Managing Director, Ricordi Munich

Nelly Querol, General Manager, Durand - Salabert - Eschig, Paris

The home for composers from across The globe

4

Periods in history can be recognized by their particular sound: the

Baroque period is intimately connected with the harpsichord; music

from the first generation of Romantics furls and unfurls around the

piano; and generations of Post-Romantics released the generous tem-

perament of full orchestras into auditoriums of increasing magnitude.

One can argue convincingly that the particular sound of the twentieth

century is that of the ensemble, be it instrumental or vocal.

Originating from the twin influences of acoustic transparency and

economy of materials, the instrumental ensemble saw the light of

day through a visionary act during the first decade of the last century

(Kammersymphonie op.9 by Arnold Schoenberg, written in 1906 for

an ensemble made up of the families of a symphonic orchestra but

limited to only “one per voice”) and reached full speed during the first

two post-First World War decades. Composers from the period of neo-

classicism [broadly: from Milhaud’s Le bœuf sur le toit   (1920)  through

Stravinsky’s Concerto for piano and wind instruments (1924) and

Janáček’s Concertino (1925) to De Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto (1926)]

found an antidote to Romantic chamber music and the Wagnerian

orchestra; those of the Darmstadt school (the Nono of Canti per 13  or

the Maderna of the second Sérénade) found a manageable platform for

the acoustic deployment of serial structures. In both cases, the illusion

of a single universal raison d’être for sound disappears and is replaced

by a panoply of varied styles whose joint lines of action are apparent:

the clarity of the presentation of the melodic lines, and the freshness

EnsEmblEs: at thE hEart of modErn music The ensemble, an audible

symbol of moderniTyby eric denuT

5

PHO

TOS:

ICE

© A

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En E

llIO

TT

of the instrumental juxtapositions, forging a new palette which dis-

regards the massed texture of the multiple strings of the symphonic

orchestra. These several “qualities,” attractive to composers and audi-

ences alike, inevitably led to the creation of many  instrumental ensem-

bles dedicated to this repertoire, and the development of these groups

in turn fostered an explosion of growth of the ensemble repertoire.

The vocal ensemble didn’t really appear until the years following

the Second World War. The contemporary composers of the first half of

the twentieth century still wrote masterpieces of the mixed chamber

choral (i.e., requiring at least 32 singers) repertoire, including Debussy

(Trois Chansons), Ravel (Trois Chansons), Poulenc (Messe en sol),

Schoenberg (Friede auf Erden ) and Strauss (Der Abend). The watershed

occurred shortly after 1945 with the appearance of ensembles “with

music stands drawn closer together” (i.e., three singers per voice) and a

repertoire composed of more transparent, almost neo-madrigalesque

sounds, after the fashion of Messiaen’s Cinq Rechants  [It is worth not-

ing, however, that at the same time Poulenc (Figure humaine) and

Schoenberg (Dreimal tausend Jahre, De Profundis) were continuing to

be faithful to the more symphonic sound of the chamber choir].

Development on all continents

With its tradition of chamber music having been well integrated

in its music schools and its symphony orchestras since the inter-war

period, Europe is at the forefront of creating dedicated performing

EnsEmblEs: at thE hEart of modErn music

International

Contemporary

Ensemble (ICE)

6

Left: musikFabrik

Cologne

Right: Neue

Vocalsolisten

Stuttgart

i communicATed wiTh ice... viA skype And e-mAil,

recordinG sAmples And sendinG Them bAck

And ForTh; i FelT As iF They were in my room in

london while i composed.—Dai Fujikura

7

nEu

E V

OC

AlS

OlI

STEn

© m

Ar

TIn

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mu

nd

ensembles.   For example, in France, autonomy in the

vocal domain began immediately after the Second

World War (including groups such as the Marcel

Couraud vocal ensemble, of which the Groupe Vocal

de France in the 1980’s, Musicatreize founded in

1987, and Les Jeunes Solistes, which became Solistes

XXI, formed in 1988, are all worthy “successors”);

and in the instrumental domain during the 1960’s

(the decade which gave birth to the   Ensemble du

Domaine Musical and also the formal inception of

Ars Nova) and has since continued without interrup-

tion with the creation of groups including:

• 2e2m, L’Itinéraire and  Ensemble Intercontemporain

in the 1970’s,

• Aleph and Alternance in the 1980’s,

• Court-Circuit,

• Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain,

• Proxima Centauri,

• Sillages,

• Télémaque,

• Linea and Cairn in the 1990’s

and, more recently,

• L’Instant Donné,

• Le Balcon,

• Multilatérale.

The other larger European countries, begin-

ning with the historical and geographical

birthplace of this repertoire, the Paris-Berlin-

Vienna triangle, have the same dynamics,

with such high-profile groups as the renowned

• Ensemble Modern from Frankfurt (founded in 1980),

• Neue Vocalsolisten from Stuttgart (1984),

• Contrechamps from Geneva (1984),

• Klangforum from Vienna (1985),

• Ensemble recherche from Freiburg (1985),

• musikFabrik from Cologne (1990),

• Ictus from Brussels (1994),

• Ensemble XX. Jahrhundert, Vienna (1971),

• Ensemble Aventure Freiburg (Germany) 1986,

• Schola Heidelberg / ensemble aisthesis (Germany) 1993,

• Collegium Novum, Zürich (Switzerland) 1993.

All of these groups are all fixtures at festivals in the same way as the

Ensemble Intercontemporain, which, as noted above, was founded

a few years earlier. All echo the 1958 creation of the ensemble “Die

Reihe” in Vienna and the London Sinfonietta in 1968, – groups that

are still prominently on the scene today. In the wave of this dynamic,

all the European countries, including even those most geographically

distant from the “triangle of origin” of the genre, saw a blossoming of

dedicated ensembles across their lands, including:  

• from the Iberian Peninsula (most notably with the Ensemble Remix,

which, despite its relative youth - it originated in Porto in 2000

- has acquired an enviable reputation amongst public and profes-

sionals alike)

• to Scandinavia (Avanti from Finland, BIT20 and the Oslo Sinfonietta

and Ensemble asamisimasa, Nordic Voices, from Norway,

KammarensembleN from Sweden, Athelas from Denmark)

• via Italy (Divertimento Ensemble, Ex-Novo, Alter Ego, Icarus)

• and Hungary (the Intermodulation Ensemble founded in Budapest

in 1985, the UMZE Ensemble there in 1996, and Componensemble

founded in 1989).

The originating countries have continued, like France, to pursue

institutional expansion:

• from the Netherlands (again most notably with Asko | Schönberg,  

now reunited, the Nieuw Ensemble and the specialised ensemble

Vocaallab),

• Belgium (Musiques Nouvelles, Spectra),

• Luxembourg (United Instruments of Lucilin),

• the UK (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Exaudi),

• Russia (the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Ensemble St.

Petersburg),  

• and the Germanic-speaking regions (KNM Berlin, eNsemble Mosaik,

Ensemble Resonanz in Germany).

This phenomenon has become world-wide in the last twenty-five

years with the appearance of important players on the scenes of other

continents, including:

• Canadian groups such as the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne of

Montreal created in 1989,

• US groups such as 8th blackbird (1996), the Argento ensem-

ble  (2000), Alarm Will Sound and the International Contemporary

Ensemble (ICE) (2001) and the Talea Ensemble  (2007),

• Asian-based groups including the Tokyo Sinfonietta (1994) and the

TIMF Ensemble from Tongyeong, South Korea (2001)

• and groups based in Oceania, such as the Elision ensemble in

Melbourne, Australia (1986).

The transplanting of the “European model” onto other continents

has been so successful that active composers as aesthetically and

8

generationally different as Georges Aperghis and Dai Fujikura, based

on the “Old Continent,” have built up over the last few years privi-

leged relationships with ensembles situated on the other side of the

Atlantic. Fujikura wrote of his concert piece Mina for five soloists of

the International Contemporary Ensemble and orchestra: “Despite the

fact that we have a vast ocean between us, I communicated with ICE, a

chamber ensemble with whom I have long-standing relationship and

with whom I can work most intimately, via Skype and e-mail, record-

ing samples and sending them back and forth; I felt as if they were in

my room in London while I composed.” Concluding with these words,

in which he accurately summarizes what a number of contemporary

composers believe: “I think that this is the best composer-player rela-

tionship you can ask for!”

An exceptional corpus in 50 years

Such institutional power cleared space for a repertoire which,

from Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie and the Neo-Classical opuses

of Stravinsky to the first Darmstadt works of Nono, Maderna and

Stockhausen, already comprised an exceptional body of instrumental

work (the vocal repertoire was yet to be built up, as previously men-

tioned, but soon would follow). The three decades of the 1960’s, 70’s

and 80’s can be considered to be a golden age for the two repertoires.

The greatest names of the second half of the century wrote some of

their best scores for ensembles, including these UMPC works:  

• Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Omnia tempus habent (1957)

• Giacinto Scelsi: Tre Canti Sacri (1958)

• Sylvano Bussotti: “mit einem gewissen sprechenden Ausdruck”

(1961-63)

• Friedrich Cerha: Phantasma ‘63 (1963)

• Iannis Xenakis: Nuits (1967), Anaktoria (1969), Phlegra (1975)

• Ivo Malec: Dodecameron (1970)

• Bruno Maderna: Juilliard Serenade (1971)

• Gérard Grisey: Partiels (1975)

• György Kurtág: Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova (1980), … quasi

una fantasia … (1988), and Double concerto for piano, cello and two

chamber ensembles dispersed in space (1990)

• Franco Donatoni: Tema (1981)

• Younghi Pagh-Paan: MADI (1981)

• Salvatore Sciarrino: Introduzione all’oscuro (1981)

• Pascal Dusapin: Fist (1982)

• Luigi Nono: Guai ai gelidi mostri (1983)

• Marco Stroppa: Étude pour pulsazioni (1985-89)

• Péter Eötvös: Chinese Opera (1986)

• Luca Francesconi: Plot in fiction (1986)

• Emmanuel Nunes: Musik der Frühe (1986)

• Klaus Huber: La Terre des Hommes (1987-89)

• Niccolò Castiglioni: Risognanze (1989)

• Gerhard Stäbler: Den Müllfahrern von San Francisco (1989-90)

These are but a few high points of a widely-circulated group of

works which now form part of the regular repertoire of the majority of

the ensembles mentioned previously.

Although these works grew from a context of intense aesthetic and

technological research (culminating in the project and creation of

Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Ircam) - a

centre for musical research - at the beginning of the 1970s), favor-

ing explorations into vocabulary and syntax, they all display dazzling

expertise placing them on a par with the great pre-Second World War

works which, up to that time had defined this repertoire. To complete

this panorama, we must add the knock-on effect of the dual phe-

nomena of the birth and then the rapid and fertile development of a

repertoire for ensembles based this time not upon the model of the

symphonic orchestra but upon certain groups of instruments from an

orchestra, as well as the increasing orientation of some established

chamber music ensembles like the Nash Ensemble (created in 1964) or

the Scharoun Ensemble (1983) towards contemporary music.

Taking advantage of a rich fabric of performers with ever-increasing

skills, and of institutions with solid financial and administrative

. . .oF course i compose diFFerenTly For The klAnG-

Forum wien ThAn For The ensemble modern. This is

very imporTAnT And iT is A source oF inspirATion.

—Enno Poppe

9

Ensemble

Intercontemporain,

Paris

10

foundations, it is natural that the “heirs” of the generations who were

born before 1945 should appropriate these tools with gusto: even if

we cannot yet easily describe such works as “patrimonial” (in the sense

that they have not had the time to be accepted universally as “modern

classics”), the selection of notable works listed below are  nonetheless

authentic artistic accomplishments which, it can be said without doubt,

will become staples of the repertoire for future generations:

• Liza Lim (Voodoo Child, 1989)

• Philippe Schoeller (Feuillages, 1991)

• Luca Francesconi (Plot II, 1993)

• Philippe Manoury (Passacaille pour Tokyo, 1994)

• Martin Matalon (Metropolis, 1995-2011)

• Stefano Gervasoni (Concerto pour alto, 1995)

• Heiner Goebbels (Schwarz auf Weiss, 1996)

• Guo Wenjing (Inscriptions on Bone, 1996)

• Pascal Dusapin (Quad, 1996)

• Olga Neuwirth (Hooloomooloo, 1997)

• Marco Stroppa (Hommage à Gy.K., 1997)

• Fausto Romitelli (Professor Bad Trip, 1998-2000)

• Gérard Grisey (Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, 1998)

• Yan Maresz (Eclipse, 1999)

• Georges Aperghis (Petrrohl, 2001)

• Salvatore Sciarrino (Quaderno di Strada, 2003)

• Enno Poppe (Salz, 2005)

• Emmanuel Nunes (Lichtung I-III, 1988-2007)

• Mauro Lanza (Vesperbild, 2007)

• Sergej Newski (Alles, 2008)

• Oscar Bianchi (Vishuddha Concerto, 2009)

• Dai Fujikura (ICE, 2009)

• Hèctor Parra (Caressant l’horizon, 2011)

• Alberto Posadas (La lumière du noir, 2011)

• László Tihanyi (Imaginary Dialogues, 2012)

Ensemble Ex Novo

11

Perspectives: beyond concert

It would appear that the emerging generation of composers unques-

tioningly accept the ensemble as being a standard means of expres-

sion. Following on from Pierre Boulez, who had an essential role after

the birth of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Friedrich Cerha, Beat

Furrer, Oliver Knussen and George Benjamin for the creation and/or

the development of Die Reihe, Klangforum and the London Sinfonietta,

many young creators invent their own tools or integrate themselves

into existing ensembles. A review of the programming of a “festival

within a festival,” like Strasbourg’s Musica, dedicated to what is on

offer in Europe today, revealed that half of the works presented (inter-

preted by almost a dozen ensembles) were by composers under the

age of 45: truly a body of young artists in the making. This season,

the well-established Ensemble Intercontemporain has given a score of

young composers the opportunity to create or reprise pieces  equiva-

lent to a third of their overall programming (in the vocal world, the pro-

portion dedicated to young composers is approximately the same as

in the larger established instrumental ensembles), while the Ensemble

Modern dedicates some of its subscription concerts in the prestigious

Alte Oper of Frankfurt for the exploration of as-yet-unknown territo-

rial universes, proof, if needed, of a “cross-fertilization” between artists

and institutions which might be searching for an equivalent explora-

tion in the symphonic or lyrical worlds.

Relationships between art forms, being a major interest in our mod-

ern times, will no doubt confirm the central position of the ensemble,

a sturdy implement that can combine the advantages of “chamber

music” (flexible scheduling and economic practicality, the increased

awareness of personal responsibility by the performers, the atten-

tion to detail) and the “philharmonic world” (mass effects produced

by symphonic compositional techniques and/or the use of amplifica-

tion, the variety of timbres enabling the   larger forms of music to be

presented) to the realization of innovative projects. In this regard, the

words of Hervé Boutry of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, about the

nomination of Matthias Pintscher (a composer-conductor in the tradi-

tion of Boulez and Eötvös) as artistic director of the group are a strong

signal:   “Matthias Pintscher has convinced us: of his interest in inno-

vation in classical instrumental tradition, of his wish to re-invent the

concert form, [and] of his curiosity and desire to include artists from

other disciplines in our activity.” To be measured against this declara-

tion is the potential for “the ensemble” to go beyond traditional con-

cert hall presentations and the imitation of the customs of Romantic

era and its large-sized concert halls. There is little doubt that it is this

potential that frequently spurs on artists such as Oscar Bianchi, Luca

Francesconi, Philippe Manoury,   Samy Moussa, Olga Neuwirth, Fabio

Nieder, Hèctor Parra, and Enno Poppe, and many others from the col-

lections of Universal Music Publishing Classical, to work interactively

with other artists and art forms on works which will enrich the ensem-

ble repertoire.

Translation: Christopher Brown

Part of this article has been published under the title “Petite cartogra-

phie des ensembles européens” in the general brochure of Musica Festival

2012 in Strasbourg, France.

The following composers and ensembles have influenced each

other greatly over the years and formed a relationship which led to

commissions, world premieres and regional premieres. Here is a small

selection:

• Guo Wenjing and Nieuw Ensemble (Sound from Tibet, Inscriptions

on Bone, She Huo, Concertino for cello and ensemble)

• Liza Lim and musikFabrik (The tongue of the invisible) and ELISION

(The Navigator)

• Luca Francesconi and musikFabrik (Unexptected End of Formula)

and Neue Vocalsolisten (Herzstueck)

• Emmanuele Casale and Ensemble Intercontemporain (2)

• Jonathan Cole and London Contemporary Orchestra (Penumbra)

• Dai Fujikura and ICE (Abandoned Time) and London Sinfonietta

(Double Bass Concerto)

• Ian Wilson and Argento Ensemble (Cassini Void)

• György Kurtág and UMZE Ensemble (Four Akhmatova-poems) and

Ensemble Contrechamp (Brefs messages)

• Balázs Horváth and Concerto Budapest (Borrowed Ideas, Faust

Groteske)

• Fabien Lévy and Ensemble 2e2m (Querwüchsig, Après tout)

• Olga Neuwirth and Klangforum Wien (Hommage á Klaus Nomi)

• Sergej Newski and Vocaallab Nederland (Autland)

• Samir Odeh-Tamimi and Neue Vocalsolisten (Garten der Erkenntnis)

• Enno Poppe and Ensemble Modern (Knochen) and Klangforum

Wien (Öl, IQ)

• Michel Roth and Ensemble Phoenix (molasse vivante)

• Fabio Nieder and ensemble recherche (Der Schuh auf dem Weg zum

Saturnio, Sogno 10 lùnedi gennaio 1892)

12

13

PHO

TO: C

OPy

rIg

HT

by E

mb

Gray locks, cut in a Beatles-style bob. Swarthy skin.

Behind thin-rimmed spectacles, darting narrow eyes;

below, thin lips that readily spread in a smile. A strange

mixture of a Chinese sage and a mischievous little boy

gazes at us from the photo of László Tihanyi.

The 56-year-old Hungarian composer can be said to

be at the zenith of his career. Every year, persistently

and continuously, he adds two or three new composi-

tions to his œuvre, which presently numbers almost

sixty works. He receives commissions both in Hungary

and from abroad; he has composed for the Contrechamps

Ensemble, for the Bath Festival, the Cologne musikFabrik

and a whole series of Hungarian performers; the première

of the opera commissioned from him by the French state

took place in the Bordeaux opera house. But he does not

mind composing just to please himself, since he knows that

Hungarian and foreign artists are glad to perform new pieces

by him. Or they may be introduced by his own chamber

group, Intermoduláció, which has been performing for more

than a quarter of a century. It is no accident that musicians

willingly play Tihanyi’s music, because what he writes always

sounds good and gives the performers satisfying material

– even  if not in the traditional sense –  to play.  As he himself

says, it is not enough for the composition as a whole to be well

formed, every individual part must in itself meet certain aes-

thetic criteria.  And for Tihanyi, these criteria are primarily clarity

and balance. It is almost thirty years now since

Tihanyi found the most appropriate direction for

his creative work, and since then, on this solid

foundation, he has built and extended his rep-

ertoire of techniques.  At the same time, Tihanyi’s

path is rather unusual in the field of Hungarian

composition, which to an outsider’s ear is gener-

ally easily recognisable.

To the extent that 20th-century Hungarian com-

position has an independent history, the pre-eminent figure in it is

obviously Bartók.  Because of the power of his personality, the uni-

versal significance of his music and his characteristically Hungarian

style, decades after his death he remains an inescapable point of

reference for his compatriots. While, after Bartók, the members of the

following generation (including György Kurtág and to a certain extent

György Ligeti as well) spent a lifetime defining their relationship with

Bartók, the younger ones (like Tihanyi) were in the fortunate position

lászló Tihanyi and his music

by péTer hAlász

i fEEl prEtty much alonE in this.

14

that for them Bartók was not a direct challenge but rather a matter of

music history.  

After receiving  the traditional training (that is, the kind that followed

the Bartók-Kodály artistic concept) at the Budapest Music Academy  , at

the beginning of the 1980s, with the aid of several visits to Darmstadt

and Warsaw,  Tihanyi was able to see out beyond Hungary’s provincial

musical life, shut in behind the Iron Curtain.  Strangely, in Darmstadt it

was not so much the works composed by the local avant-garde that

held his attention, but the works of the Itinéraire group working there

as guests, especially those of Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey and Hugues

Dufourt. Although electronic music and the combining of it with nor-

mal instrumental music has not since then aroused Tihanyi’s interest,

the sounds achievable in accordance with special harmonic principles

from an ensemble of acoustic instruments, owing to the nature of har-

monics, certainly fascinated him.   And it was at least equally impor-

tant that he came under the influence of the formal purity of French

musical thinking and its hedonism, concentrating on the emotional

components of sound. And as he researched further back in time, he

recognised that many of his French contemporaries’ predecessors like

Boulez, Messiaen , Debussy and even Berlioz composed in accordance

with similar principles. His choice of the French path meant diverging

from the Hungarian and Central European mainstream, which followed

the cult of German musical thinking, the priority of motifs and organi-

cally developing form. (A hundred years ago, Kodály too, with only tem-

porary success, recommended following French examples in Hungarian

composition, which then was under German dominance.)   Although

Tihanyi never denies that he is a Hungarian composer, he senses that

among his Hungarian colleagues his situation is unique. “I feel pretty

much alone in this,” he says, but he does not regret having persistently

defied not only the local expressionist fashions but also the imported,

tempting trends of minimalism and neo-Romanticism.

Tihanyi likes best to express the duality of clarity and complexity

in various kinds of works written for chamber ensembles that vary in

make-up from work to work. In his hands this apparatus, which sets in

motion a multitude of different tones and timbres, enabling soloistic

chamber music, homophonic or polyphonic effects to be produced,

functions as an extremely flexible and multi-coloured tool. The sound

created by the ensemble, however, is never an end in itself, but always

a means of conveying a thought-provoking idea. Tihanyi does not

deny – and in the titles of his works frequently points out to his listen-

ers – that his works are mostly inspired by impressions from music or

from outside the realm of music, and more than once by deeply hid-

den connections in music history, which at times engage him through

several compositions. Examples of such linked groups of works are

his series reflecting on Schubert’s Winterreise cycle (Winterszenen,

Nachtzene, Irrlichtspiel, 1991); his Enodios (1986) and Pylaios (1988)

based on aspects of the Hermes myth; and his “Neptune series” (Triton,

Nereida, The Passing of Neptune, 1995-96), which deals with astrologi-

cal aspects. If the sources

of the underlying ideas or

the numerical proportions

expressed in the resulting

sound, rhythms and formal

construction might sug-

gest a mystical atmosphere,

all these remain the com-

poser’s private business,

protecting the genesis and

development of the works,

since nothing is more alien to

Tihanyi than any hazy, unclear mode of expression. Looking back over

his earlier years, it is, in fact, his excessive obviousness, what he calls

his “mania for order” that he considers to be his main fault. But the

listener cannot blame him for it, because it is precisely this that makes

Tihanyi’s music so comfortable, so easily inhabitable and comprehen-

sible. What is more, it is just these wide, well-lit musical spaces that

can conceal secret crannies like the breathtakingly moving moments

that occur in virtually every work, filled with characteristic cadenzas,

when musical time is suspended.

What is very typical of the consistent nature of Tihanyi’s art is his

reworking, re-interpretation and acoustic or compositional re-clothing

of earlier creations. In every case, these reworkings tend from smaller

apparatuses towards larger, more complex ensembles, enriching,

expanding and rendering more complex the chamber music sound

characteristic of the original works. Thus sometimes unusual “concert

. . . iT is noT enouGh For The composiTion As A

whole To be well Formed, every individuAl pArT

musT in iTselF meeT cerTAin Aes TheTic criTeriA.

—László Tihanyi

15

works” come into being, which of course have little in common with

traditional concertos since, in singling out one or two instruments

from the chamber music ensemble and giving them the role of soloists

accompanied by the rest of the ensemble, he is merely picking out and

reinforcing individual strands from the earlier composition, to weave

around them a richer texture. This was how individual movements of

the clarinet-cello-piano trio Schattenspiel (1997) gave rise to the ver-

sion entitled Atte (1999) with solo clarinet and cello accompanied by

a chamber group; from the four-hands piano piece Matrix (1998) came

Matrix/Kosmos (2002), and from the harp piece entitled Linos (2002)

came the “mini-concerto” for harp Arnis (2010). At the same time,

these transformations reveal a lot about Tihanyi’s way of thinking and

his ideas about sound. Here ear-caressing sound is at the same time

a background to the strongly-defined musical ideas that come to the

fore and is, in itself, an independent actor, which appears in the various

forms of a work in many different lights.

Although Tihanyi feels himself to be primarily an instrumental com-

poser, his only opera so far, Genetrix (2001-2007), based on the novella

by François Mauriac, is one of the outstanding musical dramas of the

past decade. More than twenty years after an abortive attempt in his

student days, he set about giving new expression to a subject that fas-

cinated him; in addition to achieving extremely original French diction,

he created an astounding theatrical effect, especially by incorporat-

ing choral passages, hymns sung in Latin, that overarch the chamber

drama, and make it reminiscent of the mystery plays. In connection

with Genitrix, Tihanyi refers to its prototypes Pelléas ét Mélisande

and Bluebeard’s Castle, but the dramaturgy of his opera, which frag-

ments time and is full of references backwards and forwards, is very

far removed from those examples from a hundred years earlier.  At the

same time Genitrix – like the operas of Berg – contains many instru-

mental forms, and from these evolved the “viola concerto” entitled

Passacaglie (2010), written for Kim Kashkashian, which is Tihanyi’s

most complex score so far for full orchestra.

A good example of his search for and discovery of external inspira-

tion is his Two Imaginary Dialogues, which was written at the request

of the Studio for New Music’s Moscow ensemble, and first heard in

February 2012 at the festival called “Russia through the Eyes of

Europeans.”   Tihanyi chose two film directors who are important to

him, so that reflecting on some aspects of their art he might sketch his

own picture of a part of Russian culture.  As he notes, in a passage in

Lutosławski’s Livre pour orchestra, he recognised that orchestral sound

can have film-like features and through sound enable near and dis-

tant views to be seen. For the chamber ensemble he created a sort of

inverted rhapsody: in the first part of the work, he evokes the atmo-

sphere of Sergei Eisenstein’s monumental battle scenes with tumul-

tuous, swirling torrents of sound which are repeatedly interrupted by

typical Tihanyi moments, like film stills. But in the second movement

he translates into his own musical language the quietly tense world

of Andrei Tarkovsky, imbued with metaphysics. In this chamber scene,

three dream pictures frame an instrumental dialogue and monologue.

Characteristically, Tihanyi expresses the contrast between the person-

alities of the two film directors in the form not of portraits but of dia-

logues, through which he incorporates himself and his own world of

ideas, distinct from both of theirs.

In 2012, at the request of the Kempten Chamber Music Festival, he

composed Rundherum for piano quintet. This apparatus is unusually

traditional for Tihanyi, and partly for this reason he took care to divide

up the ensemble and re-interpret it in an original way. As the title of

the work (= Round about) indicates, in certain sections of the work the

two violinists and the viola player circle round the cellist and pianist,

who are fixed at their instruments. When one after another all three

reach the music stands behind the piano, they step out, as it were, from

the framework of the proper piano quintet genre and we hear them

from a sort of dream world. Their separateness is underlined by their

playing mouth organs and percussion instruments at the rear desks,

and their music sounds at a different tempo from each other and from

that of the two musicians playing in the foreground;  in the most com-

plex section of the work as many as three separate levels are opposed

to the cello-piano duo.

The avantgarde-minded French director of Genitrix, Christine

Dormoy, once said : “Mauriac is classical, and so is Tihanyi’s style of

writing”. Hearing Tihanyi’s music, this summary judgment may seem

strange, but we have to admit she is right – if, by “classical” in the tradi-

tional sense, we mean artistic creation on a human scale, transmitting

human standards. Translation: Lorna Dunbar

16

originality and

charactErmaverick composers giving an essenTial

new impeTus To musical life: an excursion Through The caTalogs of ricordi munich

by michAel zwenzner

17

“Born in Karlsruhe in 1938. Emigrated to

Australia in 1960. Part-time jobs, shift work in

steel-processing industries which led to first

encounters with sounds of a ‘metallic kind’.

Experiments with so-called ‘hard and soft edges

of reverberating metal,’ intense investigation of

the unpredictable, non-lyrical but also poetic

aspects of sonically ‘at random’ events. Credo:

‘Poetry in noise.’ Studies at the Savitsky Actors’

School in Melbourne, 1961-63. Joined a travel-

ling theatre group. Studied guitar with Antonio

Losada and music theory with Don Andrews in

Sydney, 1966-70. Returned to Europe in 1971….”

This is just a short excerpt from the unusual bio-

graphy of composer Volker Heyn, who lives these

days in Karlsruhe, and whose works are published

by Ricordi Munich.

Within the innovative music of the past hundred

years, such unusual careers seem to be more the rule

than the exception. Many significant 20th-century

composers who long created in obscurity, or whose

works initially experienced rejection, turned out later

in their careers to be precisely those trail-blazing

artists whose music has left the most profound historical traces, and

enjoyed the most lasting success. Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis,

György Kurtág and Salvatore Sciarrino (all substantially represented

in Universal Music Publishing Classical   (UMPC)) catalogues are

among those composers who for decades worked in obscurity,

until suddenly their significance was widely appreciated, and they

could gain the laurels that their outstanding artistic achievements

deserved. In some tragic cases (one thinks of people like Gérard

Grisey and Fausto Romitelli), this enormous success only came after

the composer’s death. In the light of an ever-more-interconnected

information society, it is astonishing that the 20th century was still

an era of spectacular ‘belated discoveries’ of great artists. But it is

just such cases that reveal the great importance of their supporters

and advocates, who are also concerned to ensure that initial success

is lasting, that their music remains available, and that knowledge

of it goes out into the world.   In the more than two-hundred-year

tradition of Giovanni Ricordi (1785-1853), the publishers in the

UMPC group have set themselves the same task, always keeping in

mind the goal of helping artists to enjoy the most durable impact

possible, on both present-day listeners and future ones.

Volker Heyn

18

i could sAy ThAT i compose becAuse i wAnT To GeT To

undersTAnd how The world FuncTions. when i mAke music,

i hAve To Give concreTe Form To ‘world siTuATions’ in

Terms oF sonic cATeGories. composiTionAl wAys oF

proceedinG, especiAlly FormAl And ‘sonosomATic’ processes Are probes providinG insiGhT

inTo world siTuATions, or Their recoGniTion.

—Rolf Riehm

19

So, for many years, Ricordi Munich has been working with some of

the most original and distinctive composers of the older generation,

including the ones whose current projects are briefly presented

below: the German and Swiss composers Nikolaus Brass (b. 1949),

Volker Heyn (b. 1938), Rudolf Kelterborn (b.1931), Thomas Lauck

(b. 1943), Rolf Riehm (b. 1937), Ernstalbrecht Stiebler (b. 1934) and

Hans Wüthrich (b. 1937). Common to them all is the combination

of single-mindedness and persistence with which they tread their

unconventional paths, their rich imagination, and their inexhaustible

inventiveness. They all display a certain scepticism regarding the

often artistically dubious “express route” to success, and reject

compliance with the widespread trend to easy accessibility. So their

initial successes occur away from major halls and stages, but their

reach consistently expands  from organic growth. What arises here is

a music lying beyond artificial excitement and short-lived hype. So

it is no accident that in their works they constantly make reference

to significant contemporary thinkers, for example, Nikolaus Brass to

the cultural critic and philosopher Georg Steiner, and Volker Heyn to

Jean Ziegler, a sociologist critical of globalization.  

Ziegler’s book “The Empire of Shame” provides the starting point

for one of Volker Heyn’s most recent compositions. The roughly

half-hour eclipse of reason (2008-10) for female voice, ensemble

and playbacks will be premiered on April 21, 2013 as part of

Deutschlandfunk’s New Music Forum   in Cologne, with Salome

Kammer as soloist, and Ensemble Aventure conducted by Alexander

Ott. It’s not a matter of conventional text setting; as Heyn says: “It

wouldn’t have been of interest for this musical work to quote the

original texts from Jean Ziegler’s accounts and reports; for this pur-

pose we have the book to refer to. What proved inspiring (if such

a word is permissible), was a particular scenario in his work, which

describes the state of affairs that prevails around and inside the

sky-rocketing garbage dumps at the outskirts of the town of Brasilia.

The scenario, the setting: every day about one thousand children

and youths are allowed to rummage upon these hills in search of

From left to right:

Rolf Riehm

Nikolaus Brass

Thomas Lauck

20

food and whatever usable objects they can salvage from these bac-

teria–infected dumps. All this under observation from sadistic secu-

rity guards and over–ambitious, zealous supervisors.”

Someone whose composing is founded on such impressions is

scarcely likely to furnish blissful melodies or sweet harmonies:

that much one can hear from the recently-released portrait

CD on the Berlin edition RZ label. On the contrary, in eclipse of

reason, for example, makes use of two pianos tuned a quarter-

tone apart, electric guitar, electric bass and playback of concrete

sounds. Journalist Oliver Alt wrote this about Heyn: “Part of what

is fascinating about Heyn is that he doesn’t shrink from the world’s

dirt. Refined aestheticizing is not what he’s about. On the contrary,

this man’s music always arises as a reaction to the most repugnant

social and political situations. (…) Despite its rough surface –

conventionally produced sounds are more the exception than the

rule – Heyn’s music glitters with a wealth of nuance that is just

astonishing.”    

Astonishment is also aroused time after time by the music of

Rolf Riehm who, following the great success of his opera Das

Schweigen der Sirenen in Stuttgart in 1994, is currently composing a

second full-length music theatre work – this time for the Frankfurt

Opera, where the work will be premiered in September 2014.

Siren Samples: Bilder des Begehrens und des Vernichtens (Images of

Desire and Destruction) is the title of the present score, already

largely completed, for which the composer also wrote the libretto.

Meanwhile his music is attracting increasing international attention,

as witness performances of his large-scale piano concerto Wer

sind diese Kinder at the Ostrava New Music Days, and HAWKING

for ensemble in Prague and Los Angeles. Concerning the latter

performance, on March 29, 2011, Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles

Times: “This, in the end, is spiritual music not in a mystical sense but

in a disorienting one. And with shocking sonic surety, Riehm reveals

a universe with a mind of its own.” In one of the long-renowned

Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, on April 29, 2013, there

nikolAus brAss’ music hAs A rAdicAl individuAl expressiviTy. his pieces deAl

wiTh pAin And insecuriTy. This is AusTere music, yeT All iTs micro- And overTone

oscillATions mAke iT viscerAl And hApTic. —Gerhard R. Koch

21

will be not only the first American performance of Lenz in Moskau

for ensemble, but also the premiere of a new work lasting about

25 minutes: according to the composer,  Pasolini in Ostia (2012) is a

kind of micro-oratorio for soprano, piano, percussion, cello and text

projections based on a radio report about the last days of Pasolini’s

life, and Pasolini’s  film using Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The singer

Alice Teyssier will perform   the demanding solo part. Riehm’s sub-

stantial discography will also be expanded in 2013: WERGO is issu-

ing a CD with Wer sind diese Kinder for piano and orchestra and the

large-scale piano solo HAMAMUTH – Stadt der Engel. Nicolas Hodges

is the soloist in both works. A further CD including Lenz in Moskau is

in preparation for the Cybele label.

In 2013, on the occasion of Thomas Lauck’s 70th birthday, a

substantial edition of four CDs will be released on the Telos label.

This will draw emphatic attention to a composer who has devoted

his life almost exclusively to the composition of pieces for small

chamber ensembles, and has thus always been rather in the

shadows of the music industry. All the same, over the course of

the years Lauck has gathered around himself a steadily increasing

number of first-rate musicians who have made studio recordings

of a total of 22 of his compositions. These include internationally

successful musicians such as the percussionist Isao Nakamura,

the soprano Petra Hoffmann, the pianist and conductor Jürg

Henneberger, and the trombonist Dirk Amrein, as well as emerging

talents like the cellist Isabel Gehweiler and the double bass player

Aleksander Gabrys. Thomas Lauck – born in Strasbourg in Alsace –

studied composition with Klaus Huber, and later pursued a double

career as a composer and ophthalmologist. He hones his works

with the utmost care. The conductor Bernhard Wulff once wrote:

“He works out the materials for his compositions the way a vintner

selects his berries in late autumn: very careful choice of details,

after a long process of personally listening to the individual sounds,

their individual lives and eventual extinction. In this, visual artists

and literary texts too act as virtual dialogue partners. Evaluation of

the single note and its resonance – this sonic tragedy of a sound’s

extinction – is one of his central compositional challenges.”

For many years, Nikolaus Brass, whose most important teachers

were Morton Feldman and Helmut Lachenmann, also pursued

a double career as composer and doctor. For some ten years, he

has built a reputation in Germany, with numerous premieres of

orchestral, vocal and chamber music works. In the Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung, the German music critic Gerhard R. Koch drew

“attention to a composer who goes his own way, at a certain

22

distance from the established music industry, and comprehensively

so. That is, Brass is a doctor: he doesn’t have to live from composing,

nor does he want to. As a sort of part-time composer, Brass enjoys

excellent company: Mahler and Ives.” Accordingly, Brass was often

in a position to compose works without external commissions, but

driven instead by inner necessity. This also applies to his first opera

Sommertag (A Summer’s Day), based on the play of the same name

by Jon Fosse (Ein sommars dag, 1999), which he is composing at

the moment. Fosse’s texts, says Brass, have an innate musicality

that makes them very suitable for music drama. This musicality

is underlined “by the dramatic principle of superimposing the

temporal levels in his dialogues. The characters move into other

times, though at first the viewer doesn’t notice this.   And in doing

so, Fosse unfurls a central ‘musico-dramatic’ factor, if one takes the

view that formed music works with memory: more than any other

art, music is able to bring the past into the present, and more than

any other art it shows what it means to be asked to experience what

Hans Wüthrich

23

is present as what has passed.” Preoccupation with the themes of

time and transience is also reflected in Brass’s concert music, such

as Von wachsender Gegenwart for 19 solo strings or Zeit im Grund

for two clarinets and eleven strings, both of which will available in

2013 on a CD issued on the NEOS label.

The inner necessity of a composer’s actions also stands abso-

lutely at the forefront for Hans Wüthrich, born 1937 in Aeschi,

Switzerland. He is only interested in a commission if the idea for

a new piece that he wants to realize is already present. And since

ideas that can stand up to his critical scrutiny are rare bits of luck,

Wüthrich’s output to date has remained pretty small. The most

recent piece, from 2010, was for two percussionists and live elec-

tronics with the title Peripherie und Mitte, premiered in 2011 as

part of a concert celebrating the award of the Marguerite Staehelin

Composition Prize to the composer, who has also been a member

of the Berlin Akademie der Künste since 2009. In conversation with

Thomas Meyer in the journal Dissonance, Wüthrich says “With every

piece I write, I start more or less from zero. Naturally I refer back

to previous experiences, but I don’t believe that I have a personal

musical language. I’m always considering afresh how to realize an

idea. And this constantly results in new arrangements of material,

and new ways of proceeding. I have this ambition, that anyone hear-

ing a piece of mine gets an experience that he can only have with

this piece, and nowhere else.” What will come next? Wüthrich has

disclosed this much: for 2013 he is planning a piece for four strings

and live electronics.

Rudolf Kelterborn, born in Basle in 1931, is another outstand-

ing Swiss composer who single-mindedly goes his own way, and

is always likely to surprise. In the journal Dissonance, Christoph

Neidhöfer writes “Kelterborn’s musical gestures are mainly distin-

guished by clearly contoured energy processes, not unlike those

that can be observed in, for example, verbal and emotional, human

expressive forms. This is where the immediacy of Kelterborn’s music

lies: for the most part, it speaks in an emotionally direct way, and

wiTh every piece i wriTe, i sTArT more or less From zero. nATurAlly i reFer bAck To previous experiences, buT i don’T believe ThAT i hAve A personAl musicAl lAnGuAGe. —Hans Wüthrich

24

its chosen musical material constantly has a vivid, transparent

effect, even in its most transfigurative moments.” Good examples

of the direct emotional effect of Kelterborn’s music are provided by

works like the Oboe Quartet for Heinz Holliger, given its first perfor-

mance at the Lucerne Festivalin 2009, and the Nachtstück for the

TaG ensemble, premiered in 2012 in Winterthur. On April 14, 2013

the Basle City Casino will be the site for the first performance of

Kelterborn’s Sinfonie 5 in einem Satz („La notte“) (2011-12), a work

commissioned by the Basle Music Academy, whose orchestra will

give the premiere under the direction of Christoph-Mathias Mueller.

We end our little excursion with the composer Ernstalbrecht

Stiebler, born in Berlin in 1934, whose connection to America’s

tradition of experimental ”maverick” composers is particularly evi-

dent. As a radio producer, he was especially keen to ensure that

composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman had an important

forum in Germany. Ricordi Munich’s acquisition of Edition Modern

Wewerka a few years ago means that they now have all of Stiebler’s

works published since 1958 in one house. Stiebler is one of the

first German composers to have built his compositions on the

reductive principles of minimalism, as early as in Extension I for

string trio, from 1963. Neither complex nor repetitive, Stiebler’s

music unfolds in a temporal and sonic space whose dimensions it

seeks to explore in all directions: the utopia of a ‘pure’ music as

an answer to the overly dominant musical ‘narratives’ of earlier

centuries. Be aware of the place beneath your feet – this Zen phrase

indicates the direction Stiebler’s music goes in: attention to the

present moment, being inside the sound, animating the sonic

space through constant repetition, and the high art of the long

wave: composing as an act of listening, as existential necessity, as

a survival strategy. No wonder that Giacinto Scelsi was also one of

Stiebler’s most important inspirations.

On January 31, 2013, as part of TransMediale Berlin Stiebler will

have a portrait concert including two premieres: …mit der Zeit… for dou-

ble bass and keyboard, and three in one 2 for bass flute, percussion and

kelTerborn’s musicAl GesTures Are mAinly disTinGuished by cleArly conToured enerGy

processes, noT unlike Those ThAT cAn be observed in, For exAmple, verbAl And

emoTionAl, humAn expressive Forms. This is where The immediAcy oF kelTerborn’s music lies

—Christoph Neidhöfer

Rudolf Kelterborn

25

piano. Following up on Unisono diviso (1999), for spring 2014 Stiebler

is working on his second orchestral work, composed on commission

from Hessian Radio, and to be premiered by the Symphony Orchestra

in Frankfurt.

The Berlin-Scene label m=minimal has embarked on a multiple

CD and LP edition of Stiebler’s music. The second CD/LP, with the

compositions ton in ton, composed for Ensemble Modern, and the

organ pieces Torsi and Betonungen, will be released early in 2013.

Of ton in ton, Stiebler writes, it was “composed relying on a tradi-

tion that reaches from the distant sounds of someone like Antonio

de Cabezon to the soft filigree poetry of Morton Feldman, so as to

penetrate barriers which are not just the Walls of Jericho; it’s more

a matter of getting beyond our inner barriers, so as to have equal

access to both far and near, and memory and dream, in an imaginary

and real sonic space.”

Translation: Richard Toop

26

PHO

TO: b

Ern

d u

HlI

g

The golden age of opera produced many innovative and daring

productions, however, this appears to have suffered a steady decline

during recent decades in many opera houses. An important exception

to this is the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, which has been program-

ming contemporary works through several generations of directors,

and Peter de Caluwe and his team successfully continue this tradition.

Awarded “Opera House of the year” by Opernwelt in 2011, this presti-

gious institution in Brussels proves season after season that opera can

be as modern as any other less intimidating artistic field. This is clearly

evidenced by the 2012-2013 season programming, which includes

Sasha Waltz’s production of Pascal Dusapin’s Passion (for the opening

of the season) and Benoît Mernier’s world premiere of La Dispute (on

March 5, 2013), both published by the French  office of Universal Music

Publishing Classical. This is what Peter de Caluwe explained to us when

we interviewed him before the season’s opening:

Opera is about community

“For me commissioning and producing contemporary opera is

a political, as well as a social and artistic statement; it proves that

opera is an art form of today. Everything we do at Théâtre Royal de

opEra: an art form of today

27

la Monnaie needs to have a contemporary edge, it needs to have the

feeling that we are making something which belongs not only to our

house, but which is clearly a way of communicating between an artist

and an audience of today. We have to allow artists to create, whether

it is recreating old pieces from the opera repertoire or adding new

pieces to the repertoire, and we have to find the audience interested

in seeing those creations. This interaction is a very Greek way of

thinking about theatre: it is talking about a community, and also talk-

ing about a process of bringing artists into society. In both cases it is

about innovation, be it a new interpretation of La Traviata or a pre-

miere by Pascal Dusapin, Benoît Mernier or Philippe Boesmans. Both

give me enormous excitement.”

An art form with a European touch

“I am a very European-thinking person, so opera as a European art

form is incredibly important to me. Brussels is not only an admin-

istrative and economic capital but also a cultural one; here we can

influence the people and the decision makers if we play our role

properly, as Munich or Amsterdam or some other houses also do.

As you know La Monnaie was already a producing house as early as

the 1900’s; a lot of premieres that did not happen in Paris occurred

here. Our house was always attractive to composers. I see it also

as a kind of statement from our country towards Europe. Like

Belgium, which has two different communities, Europe is a con-

glomerate of different  nations and regions; so our commitment

to opera, singularly contemporary opera, can be interpreted as a

pro-European political statement.”

Audiences are curious

“People are curious and not only about staging. You have to

take them on an adventure and help them discover territories

they don’t know. If they are in territories they already know, they

may already have made a judgment. Offer them Les Huguenots

by Meyerbeer (as we did in 2011 in the new critical edition by

Ricordi Munich) and they are completely open, they have no

judgments in advance. Offer them a world premiere and there

is yet a different kind of curiosity. This is exactly what we are

doing with Benoît Mernier’s new piece La Dispute. We have

engaged a lot of patrons who are already committed to the

piece: they contributed to the commission, they had read-

ings of the libretto, met the stage directors, the librettist

and the composer, the young singers, a whole making-of

process which makes them understand what it is about.”Peter de Caluwe

an inTerview wiTh peTer de caluweby eric denuT

28

The 2013 season, from Pascal Dusapin’s Passion to Benoît Mernier’s

La Dispute“The two contemporary pieces we programed this season are both

closely related to the passion: the passion between two people which

starts with a relationship and the dispute that ends it. I have tried to

connect the whole season to this topic: there are references between

Marivaux’ La Dispute (which surprisingly had never been used as

a libretto, or at least as a basis for a libretto) and Mozart’s Cosi fan

tutte; the passion is also linked to Manon Lescaut, La Traviata, Lulu,

all related in some particular way to this whole discussion between

Lei and Lui which is so fantastic in Pascal Dusapin’s score – a piece

in which we are looking from Eurydice’s point of view, why she does

not want to return.

“Looking for common themes make us very creative – such as find-

ing a way to work on Marivaux – who always was one of my favorite

writers. I am convinced the 18th century is much closer to our contem-

porary soul than the 19th - the free spirit, the individuality, people who

dared doing things beyond the border of bourgeois life. So Marivaux

is a kind of contemporary writer, who happens not to live in our time!

Benoît Mernier, sharing this vision, came up with a project based on

La Dispute and after a lot of research together with Joël Lauwers and

Ursel Hermann we ended up with a libretto based on several theatre

plays, including La Dispute, of course, but also La Double Inconstance,

for example. As we also wanted to work with the fabulous singers

Stéphanie d’Oustrac and Stéphane Degout and give them a bigger role,

we specifically looked for and found beautiful passages in Marivaux’s

body of work.”

Musicians and contemporary opera

“Our orchestral musicians are asking for premieres and contem-

porary pieces. It makes them much more individually responsible,

because most modern compositions are, like Pascal Dusapin’s Passion,

very soloistic. We do not like thinking about “specialist singers” in

modern art music. An artist able to sing Verdi should also be able to

sing contemporary musical writing! Why should someone so fabulous

as Barbara Hannigan be portrayed as a 21st century music star? As you

know she is equally at home singing Baroque motets as well as Ligeti’s

Grand Macabre or Dusapin.”

i cAll iT A sine quA non condiTion. we need To creATe The riGhT compAny

FeelinG From The very beGinninG, wiTh everyone involved – when This

hAppens, iT is The mosT exciTinG ThinG you cAn experience!

—Peter de Caluwe

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Recipe for success

“The most important thing is to have all the ingredients from the

beginning: a real team involving the conductor as well as the stage direc-

tor. You have to know what kind of direction of development you are

heading into. I call it a sine qua non condition. We need to create the

right company feeling from the very beginning, with everyone involved

– when this happens, it is the most exciting thing you can experience! I

mean, Mozart, Verdi, Strauss, even Wagner in some way (with himself!)

shared this point of view. If this is not the case, I will feel something is

not working well, even if you have the best singers in the cast. That’s

one of the reasons why we sometimes have had “holes” in our creative

rhythm: suddenly you may have the feeling “Oh, there is something not

really OK here.” Either this is going to be too late, or the composer is not

really inspired, or it doesn’t work between him and the stage director –

anything can happen. Or, I can have the feeling the composer is writing

the piece because we asked him, not because he needs to. Someone like

Pascal Dusapin coming to us with an idea he had when he was 18 years

old for his next project in a future season - this is fantastic. If someone

comes with this kind of idea, you know you have started well!”

Passion, music & libretto by Pascal Dusapin

Premiered on June 29, 2008 at Aix-en-Provence.

Belgian premiere on August 30, 2012 at the Théâtre de la

Monnaie with a choreography by Sasha Waltz & guests with

the Orchestre de Chambre de la Monnaie and the Vocalconsort

Berlin conducted by Franck Ollu.

La Dispute, music by Benoît Mernier, libretto by Joël Lauwers

and Ursel Hermann after Marivaux

World première on  March 5, 2013 at the Brussels Théâtre

de la Monnaie - in co-production with Opéra National de

Montpellier.

Orchestre symphonique de la Monnaie conducted by Patrick

Davin

Stage direction, Karl-Ernst  and Ursel Hermann with the col-

laboration of Joël Lauwers

30

Klezmer ensemble and string orchestra - bearers of different tra-

ditions, different cultures. In the past decade, the Budapest Klezmer

Band and the Ferenc Liszt Chamber Orchestra have proved in their

joint concerts that the melodic world of the instrumental music of

the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe as brought to life by an en-

semble consisting of   clarinet, piano, accordion, trombone, violin,

double bass and percussion can be successfully combined with the

sound of the classical orchestra. Ferenc Jávori’s Klezmer Suite has

become part of the repertoire of both ensembles, and has scored

notable successes both in Hungary and abroad. The score appeared

in print not long ago, thus becoming available to other ensembles

as well. The composer talks about the background to the creation of

the work:

At some time in the 1970’s, you moved from Munkács, Ukraine

(then part of the Soviet Union) to settle in Hungary. When was that,

and what was your reason for moving?

In 1972, my younger sister married a Hungarian Jewish boy and set-

tled here, and, in accordance with my parents’ wish, the whole family

followed her. I was 28 years old at the time.

Munkács traditionally had a sizeable Jewish community.

Presumably you too grew up in that community. From the seventies

onwards there was a continuous exodus of Jews from the Soviet

Union. Was your migration part of that process?

If at that time, in 1972, we had not followed my sister, some time

later we would almost certainly have emigrated to America or Israel,

as the rest of the family did. We saw clearly that we had to leave the

Soviet Union, but our motives for leaving were economic rather than

political. In the seventies, there were more than four thousand Jewish

families living in Munkács. I went there last year, and heard that there

are just two hundred and seventy-two Jews left. Jews have virtually

disappeared from Sub-Carpathia.

What languages did you speak at home?

Yiddish and Hungarian.

How religious was your family?

We did not maintain a kosher diet, but my father was religious, and

we observed the holidays and festivals. Ours was a big family, there

were lots of relatives, and on these occasions we always got together.

On some feast days there were twenty to thirty people sitting round

the table. As a child I thoroughly enjoyed these occasions; we were

a very loving family. Today we are scattered, fate has planted us in

thE fortunatE

of two

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convErgEncEmusical worlds

an inTerview wiTh ferenc Jávori, leader of The budapesT klezmer bandby lászló Gyori

32

different continents, but we are a very close-knit family.

How did you begin to study music?

When I was six, my mother took me to see old Mr. Spitzer, head of

the local music school, and had me enrolled. I would have liked to play

the piano, but Mr. Spitzer told my parents – the war and the Holocaust

were still a recent experience – that a person can flee with a violin,

but not with a piano, so my parents decided for me: the violin became

my main instrument, and the piano my second instrument, but, in the

Soviet Union, it too was taken very seriously, and in my final exam I

played a Mozart piano concerto.

In Munkács, to what extent was there a living tradition of Jewish

instrumental music?

In the Soviet period there was no longer a living tradition. Jewish

songs, however, were still sung by the community. From my mother

and from uncles and aunts I heard a lot of Yiddish songs; my grandpa

talked about the   pre-World-War I   klezmer musicians, who played

together with gypsy musicians; in fact it was from him I heard that a

real klezmer band played at the wedding of the daughter of Spira, the

miracle-working Munkács rabbi. The way I became acquainted with

klezmer was that in the town there was a wonderful leading violinist

called Galambosi, who played in the Csillag restaurant. When I was at

secondary school I used to go with my parents to the Csillag restau-

rant garden, where Jewish melodies were sometimes included in the

program. I spoke with Galambosi, who told me what sorts of tunes he

had learned from his father, who had played with klezmer musicians

before World War I. At that time in the Soviet Union, no Jewish culture

or Jewish music officially existed; the older members of the commu-

nities still knew songs, but nothing escaped the attention of the cen-

sor. Programs – for example, even those performed in restaurants by

gypsy musicians – had to be approved by a party committee. It was

not advisable to advertise that one intended to play Jewish music.

Meanwhile, I went to Ungvár to the conservatory, then to university in

Drohobics, but I frequently visited Galambosi, who showed me melo-

dies which I transcribed. I found this musical world interesting and

exciting, and I sensed it would be important to me, so I eagerly col-

lected material. Most of my collection I owe to Galambosi, but I also

sought out elderly gypsy musicians in Nagyszőllős, Raho, Técső and

elsewhere, and transcribed a lot of music; meanwhile I completed my

university studies, obtained my diploma as a violin teacher, and got a

job in Nagyszőllős teaching violin.

Did your klezmer music-making in fact begin after you moved to

Hungary?

In the first period after I moved here, I had to look for work. Luckily CO

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Sfor me, the Budapest Operetta Theatre advertised auditions for a vio-

linist, so I found a job. But at that time, it did not even occur to me to

dig out my collection of Jewish music.

As far as I remember, in the ‘70s, Jewish music did not enjoy great

popularity in Hungary either. Although two Hungarian music historians,

Judit Frigyesi and Péter Laki, collected liturgical music, there was no

great fashion for Jewish instrumental music at a time when in Hungary

the dance-house movement was flourishing.

What is more, the Jews in Hungary related very differently to their

Jewish roots from those living in Sub-Carpathia. With only slight exag-

geration, I could say that Jewish culture did not exist either. The major-

ity concealed their origin; only after 1990 did a lot of people whom I

had gotten to know in the ’80s admit to being Jewish. As assimilated

Jews, they did not feel it to be an important element of their identity;

in their eyes I was a curiosity. Until the ’90’s, it would not have occurred

to me to do anything with my collection of Jewish music.

It was only some time during the 1980’s that klezmer music became

popular again. When did you first encounter klezmer ensembles?

The genre’s renaissance started at the beginning of the ’80s. It was in

1988 that I first encountered it, when I was travelling in America, and

in a New York record shop I saw a lot of klezmer recordings and sheet

music. I bought two records, listened to them at home, and was aston-

ished to discover that half of the tunes were familiar to me.

Listening to klezmer music, the layman has the impression that as

in jazz, here too there is ample scope for improvisation. Is there re-

ally? Is it a case of reconstruction? Perhaps re-creation? How much

freedom does the performer have?

Originally, the dilemmas were very similar to those experienced

in folk music. How authentic does the sound have to be? Should this

music be performed as it was a hundred years ago or, moving with the

times, should other elements also be incorporated in it? In America, at

first authentic sound was the aim, which in the home of jazz proved

untenable. As time went on, realizing this, the klezmer musicians

tended increasingly to incorporate improvisation in their music.

What is the “compulsory” composition of a klezmer band? Clearly,

in the various groups different instruments can be heard. Is there

some kind of compulsory minimum?

To begin with I adopted the composition of the 13 member American

Klezmer Conservatory Band. Later I came to realise that a seven-mem-

ber group – accordion, clarinet, violin, trombone, double bass, drums

and piano – better expresses my ideas.

The Klezmer Suite was the fruit of a collaboration with the Ferenc

Liszt Chamber Orchestra. What is the history of the piece?

To me, the Ferenc Liszt Chamber Orchestra had always floated at

some unattainable height; I had heard them in countless concerts,

with Jean-Pierre Rampal, with Isaac Stern and others, and I had the

utmost respect for them. I would not have dared to think that one

day we would be partners, that we would make music together, and

indeed that one day they would play notes written down by me.

Then once, at one of our concerts, I discovered János Rolla, the con-

certmaster and artistic leader of the orchestra, sitting among the

audience. At the end of the concert. he came over and warmly con-

gratulated us. He liked the music and also our playing. He made a

point of going over to our accordionist, Anna Nagy, and told her that

up until that evening, he had always hated the accordion, but Anna

had convinced him of the instrument’s virtues. A few years after that

evening, János Rolla phoned me, we met and he asked me if I would

write something for the orchestra, because after so many Baroque

and classical works they would like to play something different. All

this happened around 1998, when that kind of “fusion” music had

not yet come into fashion. At that time, I was still a beginner as a

composer; I had written a few pieces for my band, and klezmer music

for two ballets, but I had never written anything for a classical cham-

ber orchestra.   The occasion was at hand. We were already regular

participants in the Jewish Summer Festival and the festival director,

Vera Vadas, asked us to produce a special program this time, so I sug-

gested that on this occasion we should give a joint concert with the

Ferenc Liszt Chamber Orchestra. From then on, there was no turn-

ing back, the program was advertised, and I began composing. In the

first half of the evening, they performed a classical program, then we

played half an hour of klezmer, and finally together we played the

movement I had composed for this occasion. There was a full house

at the Dohány utca Synagogue in Budapest; we played to an audi-

ence of four thousand. Great expectations had preceded this con-

cert, thanks to the reputation of the Ferenc Liszt Chamber Orchestra

and the unusual pairing. It was such a huge success that afterwards

they refused to let us leave the platform. We had to repeat part of

the movement. This success boosted my confidence enormously, so I

composed the whole suite, which we subsequently have played in a

lot of concerts, a recording has been made of it, and the Győr Ballet

Company has choreographed it.

As a matter of fact, to what genre does this piece belong? A work of

serious music on Jewish themes? Crossover? What would you call it?

I am unable to decide, but perhaps it is not important. It is the fortu-

nate convergence of two musical worlds, which is an experience not only

for us performers, but also for our audiences. Translation: Lorna DunbarFerenc Jávori

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francesca verunelliBorn in 1979, Francesca Verunelli studied composition with Rosario

Mirigliano at Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence where she

obtained her diploma summa cum laude.

In 2005, she was admitted to the Master’s Course in Compostion at

the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where she studied

with Azio Corghi.

In 2008, she participated in the Ensemble Aleph’s International

Forum, which performed her work RSVP in Paris. The same year, she

was accepted into the Cursus for composition and music technology at

Ircam, where two new pieces were produced: Interno rosso con figure

for accordion and electronics (2009, Anthony Millet, accordion) and

Play for ensemble and electronics (2010, Ensemble Intercontemporain

directed by Susanna Mälkki).

Her piece Neon   (2008) was performed in Domaine Forget (Québec)

by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, under the direction of Lorraine

Vaillancourt. She also received a French State Commission from the

Nomos ensemble for whom she wrote Syllabaire (2009) and other com-

missioned ensemble works for the KDM and Accroche Note

ensembles.

In 2010, her orchestra piece En mouvement (Espace

Double) was played by the Mitteleuropa Orchestra under

the direction of Andrea Pestalozza at the Venice Biennale,

where she was awarded the “Leone d’Argento”.

The same year she received: an Ircam commission for

a string quartet Unfolding, which was premiered by the

Arditti Quartet in March 2012 at the Biennale ‘Musiques

en Scène’ in Lyon; a joint commission from the Neue

Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the Venice Biennale for a

chamber opera Serial Sevens to be performed in July

in Stuttgart and in October at Venice Biennale 2012; a

commission from the Italian ensemble RepertorioZero

for #3987 Magic Mauve (a work for percussion and

electronic), premiered during Milano Musica 2012.

Other recent commissions include: The narrow corner,

an orchestra piece for Radio France to be performed in

2013; Cinemaolio, an ensemble work, for Court-Circuit

(Commande d’État 2011) and The dark day for cappella choir (commis-

sioned by the French renowned choir Accentus) to be premiered in 2014.

Moreover, winner of the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Award

2012, the Lucerne Orchestra will premiere in 2014 a piece commis-

sioned for the occasion.

Francesca Verunelli

36

ThAnk you, AdAm, For demonsTrATinG conTemporAry music cAn brinG

emoTion And hAppiness—audience member in Nancy, France, after a performance of La Luna Azul

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samy moussaSamy Moussa (born in 1984) studied composition in Munich with

Matthias Pintscher and Pascal Dusapin at the Hochschule für Musik und

Theater and graduated last year. Durand is proud to have published his

very first String Quartet premiered by the well-known Arditti Quartet

during the famous Internationale Ferienkurse of the Musikinstitut

Darmstadt under the aegis of Thomas Schaefer. Also a conductor, Samy

Moussa is becoming a major personality in Germany, conducting and

being performed by orchestras and ensembles such as BR, the MDR

Sinfonieorchester and Ensemble Modern. In Canada, his home country,

he is also a regular guest at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

where Maestro Kent Nagano premiered two symphonic pieces.

adam schoenbergAdam Schoenberg is Universal Music Publishing Classical’s most

recent American composer, and he has already proven himself to be

one of the finest emerging talents on the international music scene.

His orchestra work Finding Rothko is being played throughout the

nation, a piece that “races through aural representations of four Rothko

canvases, conveying the exhilaration of being drawn into his bright

blocks of color and the more reflective mood brought on by subtler

shades.” (Grand Rapids Symphony)

This season Adam began his tenure as the first-ever composer-

in-residence of the Kansas City Symphony, which will premiere in

February 2013 his very own rendering of “Pictures of an Exhibition,”

his Picture Studies, based on modern artwork from the collections

of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Just as in Mussorgsky/

Ravel tradition, he first composed highly virtuosic piano studies which

he then orchestrated. He has also established a young composer’s

workshop, where he teaches composition to high school students and

which will culminate in a performance of their works by the Kansas City

Symphony in May.

Currently, Adam is working on a new orchestra work, Bounce, which

is a co-commission by the Aspen School and Music Festival and the Los

Angeles Philharmonic.

His American Symphony,   inspired by the 2008 U.S. Presidential

election and written for the Kansas City Symphony and Michael

Stern, has still as much relevance today in its expression of hope

and optimism as when it was conceived, and will be revived by many

orchestras around the U.S. over the next two seasons.

La Luna Azul, his most expressive and emotional work, inspired

by his love for his wife, who he met while being a fellow at the

McDowell Foundation, is based on a piano trio Luna y Mar, just one

of many chamber music works that round out his substantial body of

accomplished compositions to date.

Left: Samy

Moussa

Right: Adam

Schoenberg

38

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To appreciate the vital role that opera plays in today’s music, we

might well   compare it to copper. Just like copper among the metals,

opera is in fact the musical genre that has remained in use the longest;

moreover, it possesses flexibility, malleability, a high level of conduc-

tivity, good resistance to corrosion, capacity to form alloys, variable

coloring depending on whether it is pure or blended with other ele-

ments, and even a series of different synonyms to define it.  The only

property that opera and copper do not share is ease of workability, a

characteristic which in the former is practically absent, given that its

twofold character – both profoundly rooted in history and at the same

time, thanks to its ante litteram hyper-textual nature, surprisingly up

with the times – demands of any composer that aspires to measure

himself/herself against it a marriage of awareness, intuition and crafts-

manship that constitutes a constant challenge.

In offering a brief account of the most recent achievements in the

field of opera, we could start with Marco Stroppa. Although many

of his works contain in their title an extra-musical reference and are

characterized internally by a marked sonorous dramaturgy, Stroppa

has always avoided any music theatre project made up of bodies

singing and acting within a scene. That is, until he came upon a fairy

tale in verse by Arrigo Boito set in an imaginary and timeless uni-

verse with rich dramaturgical potential; appropriately adapted, this

gave rise to the creation of his first opera, produced in 2012 at the

Opéra Comique. A ”musical legend” for four singers, four actors, eleven

instrumentalists, voice, invisible sounds, spaciality and acoustic totem,

Re Orso is an anti-fairy tale: the king is a monster, the heroine loses her

head and the final triumph is reserved for a worm. In short, it is a fierce

criticism of the sinister workings of power, the dramaturgical evolution

of which is well-suited to  the compositional processes  favored by (or

embraced by) Stroppa, who, in place of the use of acoustic instruments

in the licentious banquet scene in the first act, substitutes the almost-

exclusive intervention of electronics in the second, thereby represent-

ing the deformation of the multiple spaces and times that live together

on the stage.

Of an altogether different character is the work of Giorgio Battistelli.

Brought up within an opera environment, with a childhood spent in

the front row of his grandmother’s provincial theatre “watching people

tell stories and produce pure variety entertainment,” Battistelli is a

well-travelled opera composer. His career began with the sounds of

everyday work transformed into music (Experimentum mundi, 1981)

and went on with monodramas, scenic concerts, melologues and other

forms of music theatre including   literary, theatrical and cinemato-

graphic references – from Shakespeare to Fellini – all invested with a

vivid   sonorous dramaturgy and its artifices. In Sconcerto, ‘music the-

atre’ (2010), Battistelli brings on stage an orchestra and its conductor;

the conductor, alas, is incapable of conducting the orchestra because

he is absorbed in trying to give order to his own confused ideas. The

speech, difficult and   in  Sprechstimme form, preserves and exalts the

a nEw wavE in italian opEra

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rhythmic-musical components  inherent to it, at times sustained by the

music, at times contradicted, if not denied, in such a way that in the

end only sounds manage to express what a verbal discourse, now in

crisis, is no longer able to disclose.

As he had already done in Big Bang Circus, Il Canto della pelle and

Giudizio universale, in Il killer di parole – the final panel in a tetralogy

composed between 1996 and 2010 – Claudio Ambrosini  tells a com-

plex, problematic story, the solution   of which, though, is left to the

audience to reflect on after the curtain has fallen. A ‘ludodrama’ (drama

game) in two acts on a subject by Daniel Pennac and the composer

himself, Il killer di parole, produced at the Fenice in Venice, tells of a

poet, a hero destined to defeat, at grips with the deletion of terms from

the vocabulary and the extinction of linguistic specificities in favor of

a “definitive” language. The multiple levels of the literary text – which

oscillate between complete words and preverbal lumps of vowels and

consonants – are reflected in the musical choices Ambrosini makes:  he

resorts to both the vocal repertory of the avant-garde and to a bel

canto approach, supported by the predominating tonal qualities of

the instruments, which delineate the evolution of characters and situ-

ations by way of distinctive sonorities in a play of reflections between

text and music.

Two Heads and a Girl, Isidora Žebeljan’s most recent opera (2012),

testifies to a persistent predilection on the part of the Serbian com-

poser for a fable-like, symbolic and imaginative music theatre already

demonstrated in her international debut with Zora D. (2003) and sub-

sequently confirmed with Eine Marathon Familie  (2008) and Simon der

Erwählte (2009).  Inspired by an Indian myth about an exchange of heads

and reinterpreted by the composer in the light of her own perception

of the events, a tight dramaturgical narrative unfolds. Underpinned by

a powerful spiritual force, the narrative maintains a point of contact

with the present while the music itself is an active player in the events,

making available folk music traditions of Balkan origins, luxuriant

orchestration, exuberant melodic invention and enthralling rhythmic

sequences – all peculiarities of Žebeljan – provoking in the spectator

an incandescent psychological and emotive impact.

The huge music theatre project that Fabio Nieder is currently bring-

ing to completion - starting out from an original text written for him by

Claudio Magris - is, by contrast, introspective and other-worldly. The

scenes of this dramaturgical and sonorous polyptych (the overall title

of which will be Thümmel, ovvero la perdita delle parole) are modeled

on the last drawings of the Trieste painter Vito von Thümmel, realized

in the mental asylum where he spent the last years of his life.  ‘Dreams’,

as von Thümmel himself  called these visions, transcribed onto paper,

of complicated labyrinths, contorted

streets, canals and horizontal projec-

tions,   furnish an ‹‹optical link›› with

the Middle-European orientation of

Nieder’s music, a crossroad between

Italian, German and Slavic culture.

The sobriety of the materials used,

the exploration of the individual

sounds transfigured and the opal-

escent expressionism that travels

on the boundaries between con-

sciousness and dreams confer

a special instrumental voice to

every image; as a result the opera

gradually assumes the semblance

of a house on the point of wak-

ing, the windows of which emit

a faint light.

Just as original and distinc-

tive is the creative develop-

ment of Fabio Vacchi, distin-

guished from the beginning

(Girotondo, 1982) by operas that he has never hesitated to define as

such. These are operas that mirror the evolution of his poetic and sty-

listic identity over time and are underpinned by a constant fundamen-

tal trait:   the impelling need to express an idea and to reawaken those

perceptive experiences that allow it to take root in the consciousness

of listeners.   Following an epic work like Teneke (Teatro alla Scala,

2007), in his most recent opera, Lo stesso mare (2011), Fabio Vacchi

takes up the challenge of Amos Oz’s like-named novel (The Same Sea)

and – in the context of a structure based on the preordained forms of

traditional melodrama – draws from it an experimental score, halfway

between poetry and prose, lyricism and recitation, in which his distinc-

tive compositional idiom takes shape around the intimate identities of

the characters. The interweaving of   psychological events finds spirit

and coherence in the music, and the personal collection of these indi-

vidual stories, each rendered akin to the other by a common desire to

bridge a distance, concrete or supernatural, from the object of one’s

affection, becomes the bearer – as always in Vacchi’s operas – of a

universal message.

Fascinated by the visionary narratives of the Hindu religion,

Riccardo Nova in Nineteen Mantras (2012) deepens his exploration

of a genre of performance art built around the interaction between

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music, dance and theatrical gesticulation.  In a daring process of musi-

cal and cultural synthesis, Nova juxtaposes the most experimental

outcomes of sophisticated Western music and the re-elaboration of

sonorities of Indian origins, utilizing the instruments of these two

musical traditions together with electronics. The contribution of the

director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti and the dancer and choreographer

Shantala Shivalingappa present a captivating dramaturgy but without

any sung text as traditionally understood. Instead, the gestures of the

body and the arborescent joining of rhythms and mixed sonorities

generate a cyclic plot that tells of genesis, desires, seductions and

archetypal rivalries.

Finally, for Luca Francesconi, opera is not a preordained genre but a

potential one: a locus capable of hosting the reciprocal fermentation

of different languages, each a generator of its own meanings. What is

involved is a poetics that is recognizable in the stylistic syncretism of

his first work for music theatre, Ballata (1996-99), but which finds its

fullest expression in the multidimensionality of Quartett. An opera in

thirteen scenes on a theatrical subject by Heiner Müller drawn from

Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses, the work was premiered at La Scala,

Milan in 2011. The two protagonists’ enervating game of exchanging

and losing identity is rendered musically by way of a double orches-

tra, which gives voice both to the private impulses of the characters

and to a collective and social dimension. This is supported by an elec-

tronic elaboration of sonorous spaces and movements, which func-

tions as an amplifier of what is happening on stage. In addition, the

virtuosic vocal writing – with recourse to a broad spectrum of styles,

techniques, registers, inflections and timbres – and the computer

treatment that synthesizes, deforms and multiplies the voices, con-

tribute to producing that powerful sensorial and intellectual impact

that makes Quartett a borderland between nature and culture, body

and techne, beauty and complexity.

Translation: Nicholas Crotty

Left to right:

Claudio Ambrosini

Isidora Žebeljan

Riccardo Nova

Fabio Nieder

42

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Anyone who thinks that opera and children are two worlds that

never meet could not be more wrong! At the present time, children’s

opera is going through a boom in popularity: one clear sign is the

growing number of initiatives that, in the spirit of the most up-to-

date music education practices, are aiming to familiarize children

and adolescents with the world of opera. And leading the field in

this regard is Associazione Lirica e Concertistica (As.Li.Co), which,

with its program Opera Education, has for many years been offering

a series of artistic-educational activities focusing on the experience

of young children (Opera Kids), older children (Opera Domani) and

adolescents (Opera.it) when exposed to opera.

We asked Barbara Minghetti (President of As.Li.Co) what the

strengths of these projects were.

The principal strength lies in opera itself, a genre which is proving

more and more appealing to young people. Its language cuts across

genres - there are no barriers - and it offers the opportunity to work at

school on a wide range of themes including issues of vital interest in

the present day. In addition, Opera Education gives us the opportunity

to work with young professionals and to have a place in an interna-

tional network that allows us to get to know different countries’ opera

scenes, different ways of thinking and different ways of working that

enrich us year after year. Working with young people, in fact, offers us

the opportunity to be always up with the times and innovative.

You mentioned an international network. What does this consist of?

We take part in Reseo and Opera Europa, where we enjoy accredita-

tion as a body that carries out opera education at the highest level. For

us, it’s vitally important to be involved in these networks in order to be

able to exchange professional know-how, ideas and artists as well as to

co-produce certain projects, as is happening this year in the context of

the celebrations for the anniversary of Wagner’s birth.by FrAncesco rocco rossi

Il sole, di chi è? by

Silvia Colasanti

44

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Young audiences are attracted not just by traditional opera reper-

tory but also by musical productions of an ad hoc character such as

those of four talented young composers - Carlo Boccadoro, Raffaele

Sargenti, Silvia Colasanti and Matteo Franceschini - whose wide-

ranging compositional interests also encompass works for children.

In fact, it is educationally-rich activity of this kind that creates the

adult audiences of the future. Not that one can overlook the inherent

artistic quality of these composers’ works, which is very high, but

what does composing for children really mean? We put this ques-

tion to Carlo Boccadoro who has composed three operas for chil-

dren - La nave a tre piani (The ship with three decks), Robinson and

Cappuccetto rosso (Litte Red Riding Hood).

Writing for a young audience is a huge challenge; you can’t hood-

wink children with concert programmes written in “avant-gardese” or

with vague aesthetic declarations. At the same time, for a composer

it’s also a very stimulating experience because very young children,

not yet being conditioned by ideologies and listening habits (so

they’re an ideal audience), immediately make it known whether or

not you have captured their attention.

Your three operas are very different from one another. La nave a tre piani is ‘an opera on opera’ in which the typical situations

of traditional melodrama are realised musically by way of vari-

ous expressive languages (jazz, song, parody, etc.) whereas

Robinson, based on the novel by Defoe, echoes a classical style.

Cappuccetto rosso, on the other hand, is an opera about moder-

nity; the protagonist demonstrates adolescent attitudes repre-

sented figuratively by way of a very distinctive use of instruments

that give life to sonorities typical of videogames. Is there a common

denominator in all of these?

In all these works I’ve used an extreme synthesis of languages, unit-

ing as much as possible different forms of musical and libretto-writing

tradition so as to constantly attract the attention of young people. I’ve

tried to weave together strands of musical worlds that are apparently

very different from each other so as to extract an essential “juice” with

which to make a range of musical cocktails that are as fresh, colourful

and tasty as possible.

In the finale of Cappuccetto rosso, as we all know, “the big, bad

wolf” (that’s how he’s defined in the libretto) is killed. But not all

wolves are bad and in fact this is the idea that is forcefully proclaimed

in Lupus in fabula (The wolf in fables) the opera with which Raffaele

Sargenti won the 2009 competition “Opera Junior” conducted by

As.Li.Co (together with the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Opéra Royal

de Wallonie–Liège). The libretto (there are also versions in French

and Spanish) carries a message of tolerance, opposition to stereo-

types and acceptance of differences. We asked Sargenti whether

these themes also impacted on the musical choices that he made.

Because this opera is a journey through different musical worlds,

I created a network of references to different musical contexts: the

wolf expresses himself in “howling blues” and is helped by a moon of

“ghostly” origins to get himself accepted into a family that feeds on

a musical language of a “cultured” Russian and Viennese stamp. The

children in the audience become protagonists in a twofold process of

“musical integration:” they sing for reconciliation between two hos-

tile people who produce a blend of their respective music, and at the

same time they celebrate the musical integration of the wolf’s howling

with the surrounding musical environment. In this way the children are

attracted by and drawn into musical experiences that were probably

unknown to them before seeing the opera.

Your opera is one of the most successful products of the interna-

tional co-operation that Barbara Minghetti mentioned. Can you tell

us something about this?

45

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The writer of the libretto (Andrea

Avantaggiato) and I worked very

closely with a Belgian director and

a Spanish conductor, both under 30

years old. It was a very stimulating

experience because we were able to

compare our experiences both on an

educational and artistic front, each of

us contributing what we had learnt in

the music and education institutions of

our various countries of origin.

Silvia Colasanti also composes mu-

sic theatre works and does so on vari-

ous fronts. Her catalogue in fact also

includes an opera for children: Il sole, di chi è (Where does the sun come from)?

We asked her how much of her non-children’s and non-opera work is

present in this work.

A huge amount! Naturally, I always kept the intended audience – i.e.

children – to the forefront of my mind, trying to give voice to a musical

dramaturgy that took account of their listening needs. For example, I

reduced the musical material to the essential so as to help the chil-

dren to recognise all the passages and their dramaturgical function.

This adjustment, however, did not in any way distort my compositional

procedures or my style, both of which remained unchanged.

In your works you are very interested in experimenting with differ-

ent sonorous mechanisms. How did you operate with Il sole, di chi è?

First of all, I made use of different vocal styles; from recitation to

actual singing, almost like in a singspiel. But above all I experimented

with and in a certain sense manipulated the sounds (vocal and instru-

mental) to obtain special dramaturgical effects. All that forms part of

my language, as does the constant search for new sonorous solutions

dictated by expressive demands that are very well-defined and dic-

tated, as in this case, by theatrical requirements.

Matteo Franceschini has composed two operas for young people: Les Époux (The couple) and Zazie dans le Métro (Zazie in the underground).

We asked him how the idea of composing for children came to him.

When IRCAM in Paris commissioned me to write a piece of music in

2009, I decided to tackle an opera because I wanted to work together

with an opera team (a libretto writer, a director, a stage designer). I

wasn’t actually thinking about a children’s audience until at a certain

point a marvellous book of photographs on scarecrows took hold of

my inclination towards the visionary and gave me the idea for my

new work: Les Époux, the protagonist of which is in fact a scarecrow.

Although composed for children, this work did not cause me to modify

my style in any way. All I did was simplify the writing, limiting myself to

basic musical gestures, even though children, equipped with an open-

ness and attention that goes well beyond the normal, have shown that

they appreciate complex writing as well.

What is there that’s special about each opera? And what do they

have in common?

They are two very different works: Les Époux – a small-scale work

and aimed at children between four and six – has a fairly simple struc-

ture. Zazie, on the other hand, has a more complex instrumental make-

up and is conceived for an audience of adolescents that are able to

enter inside the structure of a text that plays with the phonic preroga-

tives of the French language. What they have in common, on the other

hand, has to do with the compositional process which, as I said before,

emerges out of the continual interaction between libretto writer, direc-

tor and stage designer. What’s emerged, though, in both cases, are ope-

ras that can be interpreted at different levels and are, for that reason,

also suitable for adult audiences.

The most up-to-date music education ideas combined with avant-

garde languages, and a great deal of attention towards theatrical

dramaturgy, are the key ingredients of both of these works, ingredi-

ents enriched by the intense enthusiasm that the composers invariably

seek to transmit to their audiences (young or otherwise). All of which

does untold good for the future of opera! Translation: Nicholas Crotty

Left: La nave a tre piani by Boccadoro.

Right: Les Epoux by

Franceschini.

46

47

vision, innovation & challEngE

an inTerview wiTh souThbank cenTre’s gillian moore by elAine miTchener

Gillian Moore is Head of Classical Music at Southbank Centre (SBC),

before which she was the Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta.

She is a Fellow and council member of the Royal College of Music, a

council member of the Royal Philharmonic Society and an Honorary

Associate of the Royal Academy of Music. She was awarded the Sir

Charles Groves Award in 1991 for services to British music; an MBE in

1994 for services to music and education, and an Association of British

Orchestras Award in 1998.

During her distinguished career, Gillian has collaborated with many

of the great musical and artistic figures of our age, from Luciano Berio

to Radiohead, from Harrison Birtwistle to Squarepusher, from Steve

Reich to Akram Khan. She has commissioned many significant new

works as well as creating opportunities for artists to reach the widest

possible audiences with their work.

For On the Page, Gillian Moore discusses the essential and ground-

breaking role the Southbank Centre plays in cultural life of London.

You have recently been appointed to Head of Classical Music at

the SBC where your previous position was Head of Contemporary

Culture. Could you explain why your previous post focused on con-

temporary culture in general and not music?

When Jude Kelly came as Artistic Director in 2006, she was really

keen to develop the idea of cross-arts festivals. I was commissioning

Gillian Moore

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events that brought together music and film, such as 2001: A Space

Odyssey with live orchestral accompaniment, Heiner Goebbels doing a

work for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall including music and

text, and works for children like Icarus at the Edge of Time by Philip

Glass. I was also doing cross-arts festivals, like The Ether Festival of

Innovation and Technology in Music, in which I am still very much in-

volved. Over the last few years, we really developed the concept be-

hind this festival: Ether currently includes a wide program, from John

Cage to Jonathan Harvey, Varèse, John Cale, and Anna Meredith’s new

band.   I was involved in the early days of programming the Imagine

Childrens Festival.   In addition to this, since it’s my passion and my

specialty, I devised and programmed straight contemporary music fes-

tivals: the Xenakis weekend, the Stockhausen festival, the Messiaen

festival, a weekend of the complete works of Varèse, a Nono festival.

My role as Head of Contemporary Culture highlighted the wide scope

of the program I was dealing with.

What role does contemporary music/culture play for you now that

you are Head of Classical Music?

My background is as a musician trained in a very traditional way. I

love all great music and I listen as much to Wagner as to Stockhausen

and Nono. I hope in the future contemporary music will be integrated

in classical music programming as much as possible. The main theme

of the whole Southbank Centre classical music program next year is

The Rest is Noise festival, which is indeed an exploration of the music

of the 20th century.

In your experience, are there two different audiences for classical

and contemporary or are they largely comprised of the same people?

It’s undeniable that a lot of people go to classical music concerts for

a particular reason: to see music that they know about and that they

feel comfortable with. There is also a large audience that’s interested

in contemporary arts in general and this audience would certainly

come to contemporary classical music concerts, if these are presented

in the right way. All my life, I have believed that we can make all sorts

of music more accessible and approachable for people by providing

different ways in and by talking about it in clear, unfussy ways.  And

of course, ultimately, the most important thing of all is just presenting

and performing the music to the highest possible standards, because

this is when it communicates.  

What is your secret to attracting large audiences and what part do

groundbreaking festivals such as Meltdown, Ether and the forthcom-

ing series The Rest Is Noise, play in drawing, maintaining and build-

ing these audiences?

I think people like big ideas. My experience is that audiences are

responsive to ideas that are bold and don’t apologize. I also feel that

it’s quite easy to program music already having an idea of who’s going

to come, but it’s much harder to think: who should be there, who

needs to hear this music?

That is very important for

me, though, ultimately, the

most important thing for

someone who is program-

ming music is to do it with

authentic passion.

What are your priorities

when you program a sea-

son: specific composers,

an anniversary, an over-

arching theme, the artists

(orchestra/conductors/

soloists)? How impor-

tant are publishers to

you in your research?

There has got to be a feeling that a certain idea is right for an audi-

ence at a certain time and that you can make the most of it; that you

can do more than just put it in front of people who actually already

know that they like that specific content.

As for publishers, I have always worked with them. They are very

creative people, with whom I often have artistic discussions. The best

publisher is someone who suggests things that actually have a chance

to really be working in a specific context.

The British arts scene is renowned for being extremely resource-

ful. In these straightened times of budget and government support

cuts, how does the SBC face these challenges without compromising

on quality?

Southbank Centre is extremely fortunate to have enormous sup-

port from the Arts Council. We have a great fundraising team and

some very important supporters: MasterCard for summer festi-

vals, Shell for our Classic International Series, and major trusts and

foundations like The Paul Hamlyn Foundation and many generous

iT’s been very sATisFyinG To see The proGress oF

A composer such As FujikurA, From his very

FirsT AppeArAnces As A younG composer,

sTill A sTudenT, To be An inTernATionAlly-

commissioned FiGure. —Gillian Moore

49

individuals who support our work from 50 cents in our donation box

right up to our Patrons’ Groups. The support they all give enables

us to face challenging times while still presenting the highest pos-

sible standard of programming.  Also, we work very much in partner-

ship with our resident orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra,

Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and

London Sinfonietta) and other important partners. For example the

PRS for Music Foundation worked with us on the New Music 20x12

weekend, which was a surprising and very successful way of present-

ing new music.

2012 is certainly an exceptional year for Britain and London in

particular, with the Queen’s Jubilee, the Olympics and Cultural

Olympiad. Do you see any long term (positive) effect from these

events for the SBC and the cultural life of London in general?

The Olympics have been the most stupendous time for this coun-

try and for London in particular.  As a Glaswegian, I felt very proud of

being a Londoner.  As far as culture is concerned, I think it has drawn

attention to the many riches that we have and to the boldness of

British culture, from the presentation of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus

Licht   in Birmingham to Southbank Centre’s celebration of George

Benjamin: Jubilation, to the New Music 20x12 weekend. Talking of

this project in specific, we presented 20 brand-new short works by a

whole range of British composers. Because the weekend happened

in the context of the Olympics, the vast majority of the events in the

weekend were free, attracting an audience that you wouldn’t neces-

sarily see at contemporary music concerts. This special time allowed

us to do this.  The other extraordinary moment has been the Unlimited

festival, associated with the Paralympics, which has allowed artists

across all disciplines to come together to present the highest qual-

ity of works.   This showcased artists who may not have had major

platforms before due to their disability, and allowed them to have

the opportunity of presenting their works in association with the

Paralympics.   I think I have learned key things this summer in terms

of my own activity, such as the richness of the scene around the

artists with disability, for example, or thinking of   lighter touches to

present contemporary music, in addition to our in-depth projects

presenting contemporary composers. Just looking around the coun-

try, I have seen that having ambition pays back: we can put on a

Stockhausen weekend and involve the local community in it, just like

the Birmingham Opera Company did; many young people in London

and Stirling can get involved with the Simon Bolívar Orchestra, and

there is a variety of young people presenting music at the BBC Proms.

You are an avid advocate for music education for children.

Following the recent success of Icarus at the Edge of Time to music

by Philip Glass (European premiere), do you hope to commission

more large-scale works for younger audiences? Is there enough

repertoire and resources out there to fulfill this mission?

This is actually an interest of mine. With Peter and the Wolf by

Prokofiev and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Britten,

we already have two masterpieces in the repertoire. Pieces that have

stayed in the repertoire are really rare. We have to keep commission-

ing new work for children from the best possible composers. I actu-

ally have a scheme to commission composers: Icarus at the Edge of

Time by Glass and Matt Rodgers with The Trial of Dennis the Menace

as part of the Imagine festival, for example. This festival is focused

on high-quality work written for children, as well as an exploration

of issues such as children’s right to culture and looking at the world

from a child’s point of view. This is a rich vein that we are pursuing as

much as possible.

How can Universal Music with its international roster of compos-

ers help an organization like yours to pursue the common goal to

make contemporary classical music heard?

I think continuing to support the greatest composers is important,

but also working in collaboration with arts organizations to make sure

that as much material about music as possible is available online. And,

of course, it’s important to present ideas to programmers that are suit-

able for a specific context.

In the past you have commissioned and programmed our compos-

ers Luciano Berio, Luca Francesconi, Dai Fujikura, Heiner Goebbels,

Olivier Messiaen,  Luigi Nono, Salvatore Sciarrino, Iannis Xenakis… Is

there anything that stands out in your memory?

It’s been very satisfying to see the progress of a composer such

as Fujikura, from his very first appearances as a young composer, still

a student, to be an internationally-commissioned figure. I will never

forget the Xenakis weekend, with the place packed to the rafters with

a very hip crowd.  It was also a great privilege to get to know Luciano

Berio and to work with him on two festivals of his music. Planning a

festival with him, which sadly he didn’t live to see, but towards which

he gave all his energy, has been one of the highlights of my career.

50

Samuel Beckett was very fond of music; he himself was a good

pianist, and he listened to a lot of music:   Schubert, Haydn, Webern;

in his final years he once came out with the involuntary confession

that “What remains is music.”  He was not happy, however, to have his

works set to music, although for the most part – often only after a work

had been composed – he did consent to some of his texts being used

in musical works. But even about his friend Marcel Mihalovici’s work

based on Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett said he did not like it, because that

play was not suitable for an opera, since “Krapp does not sing, you

know.” To Morton Feldman, who asked him for an opera libretto, he

declared plainly that “I don’t like opera...I don’t like my words being set

to music.” In the end, however, he did write a libretto for Feldman after

all. The reason for his reluctance in all probability was that he felt his

words to be complete in themselves, together with their phonetic char-

acter and intonation, and the setting of them to music, obeying its laws,

ruins them, falsifies them. At least as important to him, however, was

the way in which his texts were edited musically: either by adaptation

of the musical forms or their use as a structural element of passages in

a known composition, in fact as an “actor,” or by means of the already-

composed tempo and rhythm of the text. According to actors’ recollec-

tions, if Beckett  himself directed a piece, the tempo, the rhythm and

the length of rests were very important to him: he meticulously marked

them (the last-mentioned in seconds), and virtually every punctuation

mark had a definite meaning for him; at rehearsals he tapped out the

required rhythm on the desk. The anecdote related about his meeting

with Stravinsky is very telling: he asked the composer – who was very

enthusiastic about the handling of time in Godot – how it would be

possible to set down in a score this musical layer of what he envisaged

as the ideal performance. Perhaps his reservations were also due to his

feeling that any musical arrangement is too closely tied to the period

in which it is written; we know that he took care to remove topical ref-

erences from his own texts.

At the same time Beckett’s intentions, apart from the texts of his

works, are faithfully preserved in his director’s copies and theatrical

notebooks, and importantly by the sound and video recordings of the

performances he directed, although with changing theatrical practice

and taste they require more and more explanation. So many stipula-

tions and documents might well dampen composers’ enthusiasm,

yet Beckett’s texts remain attractive. Certainly their brevity and strict

editing represent a challenge to musical adaptation – though Beckett

excluded the use of incidental music or illustrative musical accompani-

ment, saying “[N]o music, for pity’s sake; it’s my last gasp.”

In view of all this, György Kurtág’s attachment to Samuel Beckett’s

texts deserves special attention; more than two decades of important

works bear witness to his continuing interest in them. As one of his

composer friends said about two emblematic works of his, it was as if

he had travelled backwards, that is, from Beckett he had come to Kafka;

and in fact his career was determined by his attachment to Beckett’s

œuvre, a relationship which was given added depth and emphasis by

one of his most important works, his Kafka-Fragments, op. 24. During

his study trip to Paris in 1957-58 he saw the first rehearsals of Fin de

partie, and although he immediately realised its importance for him,

according to his own admission he did not understand it at all. Yet

this experience prompted him to study Beckett constantly, to compre-

hend his works, and, not least, to make several abortive attempts to

set Beckett texts to music. In the case of the uncompleted works, it is

difficult to detect the reason for failure – we can only surmise that it

was the armor-like structure of the chosen original works that made it

impossible to set them to music; it would have been almost impossible

to find a valid solution in place of the rigidly formalized structure of the

text and the stage movements.

The breakthrough came with a peculiarly occasional composition.

The text that served as the basis for it was Samuel Beckett’s last writ-

ing – originally written in French, but Beckett made an English transla-

tion as well. Kurtág, although he had never before set a translation to

music, on this occasion first made use of the Hungarian adaptation by

István Siklós, but when he came to write the second version of it, he

worked the English translation also into his composition. Beckett’s text

is a late ars poetica: the struggle for expression, for expressiveness, for

utterance, and the constant falling back to the beginning; not just the

search for the right word, but the struggle for the appropriate expres-

sion, to find the truly appropriate word for the known meaning. It is

not the futility of verbal expression that the text proclaims, but the

virtual impossibility of a successful outcome to the search. The gen-

esis of Kurtág’s work, Comment dire/What is the Word, would have been

unimaginable without Ildikó Monyók’s acting skills. The actress lost the

power of speech as a result of a car accident, and only at the cost of

unbelievable efforts, and with enormous willpower, regained it after

seven years of dumbness. At one stage in the work of rehabilitation she

could not yet speak, but was able to sing – among others, she learned

two songs by Kurtág. Kurtág heard these songs and, in the moving qual-

ity of Monyók’s performance, her struggle to express herself in words,

he saw a parallel with the subject of Beckett’s text.

The first version of the composition (Samuel Beckett Sends Word

Through Ildikó Monyók in the Translation of István Siklós: Mi is a szó, op.

30/a) was written in 1990, for voice and upright piano. Throughout the

51

piece the piano accompanies, in the strictest sense of the word; it plays

exactly the same notes as the singer sings, at the same pitch. More

precisely, the vocal part requires a kind of sound production between

singing and recitation, with concrete pitches that can be recognised and

followed (not as in Schoenberg’s Sprachgesang parts), but not sung but

spoken, shouted and screeched or whispered. The vocal and the piano

parts are like each other’s shadow, but it is impossible, or scarcely pos-

sible, to tell which leads and which follows the other. The drama of the

text unfolds in the vocal part, but its framework, form and direction are

perceived and understood in the musical action; basic elements line up

side by side, as if repeating in music the question posed at the beginning

of the text: “What is the word?”  What is music? And perhaps the great-

est paradox and miracle of the way the music is formed is that even the

most fragile musical material, motifs following one another in an order

that is at first imperceptible, musical “word-fragments”, scraps of sen-

tences,   link-words and suffixes can

become arranged into a musical

process – preserving and eliminat-

ing the great paradox of Beckett’s

late texts; after the final reduc-

tion, eventually the text itself also

appears as music in the mind of

the listener and reader.

Kurtág’s music is not a “set-

ting to music” of Beckett’s text

in the traditional sense of

the term; rather a particular

reading or interpretation of

it in the different medium of

another art, music. For this

reason, it is also possible

that among Kurtág’s “basic

elements” direct quotation

found a place: for the most

painful, most direct sen-

tence in it, he used notes

from the slow movement

of Bartók’s violin concerto;

which raises the question,

is it a quotation in music,

the art of time, if only

the notes of a melody

are quoted, and not its

rhythms, its beat? And of course, because Bartók’s melody lives in

our memory together with its rhythm, we expect to hear the notes in

the original rhythm – and since here they do not follow each other in

that way, in this quotation we can   perceive what is perhaps the most

important formative principle of Kurtág’s art: the creation of continuity

with measurable, countable, calculable time.

The orchestral version of the work (What is the Word, op. 30/b, 1991)

includes the performance space also among the basic elements of the

composition; from 1987 onwards it is a frequent feature of Kurtág’s

orchestral works that various groups of performers are positioned at

different points in the hall. In this piece, however, spatiality produces

györgy kurTág and samuel beckeTTby András wilheim

what rEmains is music

52

CO

Pyr

IgH

T by

An

dr

EA F

ElV

égI

truly unusual acoustic ideas: not just the distant nature of the

individual groups is important, and the direction from which

the sounds reach us, but rather the fact that we are hearing

unison notes, and thus every sound defines a different spatial

position. If we regard these sounds – to borrow Cage’s termi-

nology – as prepared sounds, then here space itself is one

factor in the preparation. But for this acoustic experience to

be able to manifest itself fully, we have to imagine such an

ideal performance in such an ideal space that perhaps falls

out of the bounds of possibility.

In the orchestral version, the language of the recitation is

still Hungarian – but the English text is recited by an eight-

member ensemble, commenting, supplementing, acting

out, or at times anticipating what happens in the leading

part. Not only does the music’s dimension alter in space,

the proportions of the musical material are also trans-

formed in comparison with the original version while the backbone

of the work remains the combination of the recitation and the piano.

This composition warns the listener that it is possible to give

Beckett’s poem a musical reading that breaks through the structure of

the text and creates an independent musical drama situation, in which

text composition also seems to find a place, and in two layers: in the

Hungarian translation and in the original, added to it more or less like

a commentary. This, however, does not mean an arbitrary re-interpreta-

tion of Beckett’s work; rather it reveals a special inner similarity in the

thinking of the writer and the composer.

The nature of this apparently unfathomable, spiritual similarity

is suggested by a brief Kurtág composition that he perhaps did not

expect to be performed. This game is deadly serious, as is the title:

Pillantás a túlvilágra (A Glimpse of the Next World): the work was writ-

ten in January 1992, the product of who knows what moment of crisis.

It consists of three inhumanly difficult vocal gestures.

The first is a sudden, terror-stricken exhalation; with ever-growing

force the air is expelled from the increasingly helpless lungs or –

depending on the performer’s choice – an inhalation like a desperate

struggle for life-giving air; as the composer’s instruction, with its own

enigmatic redundancy, says: “Suck the air backwards”. Whichever direc-

tion is chosen, the first gesture is followed by a long pause – not with

the breath held, but with no breath taken at all. This is to be unbear-

ably, insufferably long. Then comes the second gesture, a gentle sigh,

the first part of which is still active, but the longer, ever fainter, weak-

ening part is increasingly resigned and passive. Again a pause, but a

shorter one: this is the silence of the moment immediately preceding

the passing over to the next world. And the third gesture is a composed

motif, the vocal realization of which is a task that demands the impossi-

ble. With a single melodic line that arcs upwards, then plummets down

and, from its lowest point, again swoops upwards, the singer has to

express wonder or, since we cannot really be sure what awaits us in the

beyond, in that sound perhaps rapture should also be expressed. Does

this represent the achievement of certainty regarding the end with

resigned – and therefore rapturous – clear vision; or amazement that

there really is a next world and glimpsing it is an ecstatic moment? Is it

perhaps self-deception even in the last manifestation of life? Anyway,

afterwards, there is a long, very long pause – a silence that denotes the

end of something, once and for all, and still continues.

The work is notated in a five-line system, with the modulation of the

various motifs, their pitch relative to each other, the vowel sounds to

be sung and of course the dynamics all precisely specified – meticu-

lously indicating the temporal disposition of the motifs, their propor-

tions and relative weight.

Drama evolves in the sounds and with the sounds, but it is by no

means a scene interpreted through extrinsic stage properties, and

even less any kind of “fooling around.” I could say that it is a Beckett-

style drama and, what is more, it is in Beckett’s most ascetic genre, the

radio play. Or since we are talking about drawing breath, in his short-

est stage play, entitled Breath, where the faintly-lit stage, strewn with

all sorts of rubbish, in a single arc grows a little brighter then darkens

again: at the beginning and end of this process we hear twice the same

quiet, stifled cry and together with the play of light an amplified inhala-

tion and exhalation, with a five-second pause between them – all this

„ … pas à pas –

nulle part …”

No. 26 “Lasciate

ogni speranza...”

György Kurtág

53

in less than thirty-five seconds

What else is this but a form of music?

If a composer wants to give a similar musical form

to a Beckett text, obviously he can resort to solutions

that to the writer may seem arbitrary. Kurtág’s major

Beckett cycle, his … pas à pas … nulle part (... step by step

… nowhere), op. 36, for baritone voice, string trio and per-

cussion instruments, which is a selection from Beckett’s

the Mirlitonnades verse cycle, supplemented by an earlier

verse, plus the original text of the Chamfort aphorisms and

Beckett’s English translations (Long after Chamfort), is on

the one hand a text composition that is faithful to Beckett,

but it diverges widely from the original intention. He con-

structs a drama that lurks as a possibility among the texts,

but this is much more Kurtág’s own: it finds its place in the

context of his musical world. It is a dramatic happening, but

with no stage; there is no action behind it.

The pseudo-drama of What is the Word and … pas à pas  …,  

its virtual space, to which the music gives reality, can clearly

achieve completeness when it   submits itself to the test

of a proper Beckett drama. Though Beckett did not like any

dramatic text of his to be part of a musical work, he did not

exclude the possibility that a composer might try to express

in music the same dramatic situation that he put on the stage.

Perhaps he showed a degree of naivety in this, or perhaps rather

that his ideas about music were bound up with the period of

his literary awakening and its prevalent musical idioms. Today,

he would almost certainly be more tolerant towards an operatic

experiment using one of his dramas for a perhaps anachronistic

undertaking. Is any musical language of our time valid, or capable

of being validated, if it seeks to present characters and situations

without playing a frivolous stylistic game with fragments of the

musical past?

It is not really proper to say any more about what is truly a work-

in-progress – even if Beckett, too, analysed an aspect of what was

at that time Joyce’s still opaque and therefore unappraisable work.

A contemporary, however, has the special opportunity and right of

observation and tense expectation: the right to follow with inter-

est how a composer wrestles with the task that Beckett defined

for himself when once while he was directing Fin de partie, he had

reached such a degree of simplification and denudation of the play

that he was able to say somewhat playfully: “Now I am going to fill my

silences with sounds.” Translation: Lorna Dunbar

54

giovanni simonE mayr:historical-critical Edition of thE complEtE works

250Th birThday in 2013(1763-1845)

55

Johann Simon (Giovanni Simone) Mayr was born June 14, 1763 in

Mendorf, near Ingolstadt (Bavaria). His father Joseph taught at the

school in Mendorf, and was also the church organist. It is from him that

Simon received his first keyboard and organ lessons, and he also sang

in the church choir; in 1769, he began taking lessons in Weltenburg.

His talent did not go unnoticed: an unnamed admirer offered to make

it possible for young Mayr to study in Vienna. However, Mayr’s parents

turned the offer down. In 1772, most likely on account of his musical

talent, Mayr received a scholarship to the Jesuit College in Ingolstadt,

where he studied grammar, rhetoric, logic, physics and theology until

1777, when he enrolled at the university in Ingolstadt.

Not surprisingly, he devoted himself less to his studies of theology,

law, rhetoric, logic and medicine, than to playing “quasi tutti gli stro-

menti d’arco e da fiato” (almost all the string and wind instruments”), as

he himself reports is his autobiographical notes (Cenni autobiografici).

As a student, Mayr earned a living by playing the organ in churches in

Ingolstadt.

It was at this time that Mayr also became acquainted with   Baron

Thomas (Tommaso Francesco Maria) von Bassus (1742-1815), a member

of the Graubünden branch of the Bassus family, and a professor at

Ingolstadt University who, in 1780, inherited the title and property

(including Schloss Sandersdorf) of the Bavarian family line. Bassus was

a member of the Order of the Illuminati, and maintained a printing

press in Poschiavo; from there he distributed enlightenment literature

in northern Italy. When the Order of the Illuminati was finally banned

in 1787, Bassus returned to Graubünden, taking the twenty-four-year-

old Mayr with him. (To what degree Mayr himself was actually involved

in the Order is not known. There is, of course, nothing about this in his

Cenni, which in any case, reveals very little about his youth. But one

can assume that it is no coincidence that in 1815,   the year in which

Thomas Bassus died, Mayr wrote the cantata Annibale – Hannibal was

Bassus’s name within the Order).    

Most likely, the art lover Bassus already had Mayr involved in domes-

tic music in Sandersdorf. In Cantone, Bassus’s property near Poschiavo,

Mayr (whose Lieder am Klavier zu singen were published in Regensburg

in 1786) only catered to his Maecenas’s lightweight needs – a task that

he may not have found entirely satisfying, or so one might conclude

from a remark in his Cenni: “ogni composizione studiata d’intreccio e

giovanni simonE mayr:historical-critical Edition of thE complEtE works

Giovanni Simone Mayr

The composers oF our Time should sTudy mAyr’s operAs. They would Find There every-ThinG whAT They Are lookinG For And whAT would be useFul For Them. —Gioachino Rossini

by oliver jAcob

56

d’imitazione, di fughe era quasi bandita”

(“Every composition with an interweav-

ing, an imitation or a fugue was almost

banned”).  But it must have been through

Bassus that Mayr made contacts that ulti-

mately allowed him to study with Carlo

Lenzi, the Kappellmeister at Santa Maria

Maggiore in Bergamo. Mayr’s first stay in

Bergamo lasted just a few months: Mayr,

as he writes in the Cenni, was dissatis-

fied, “che non poteva ottenere di essere

istrutto ne’ primi principi dell’ arte di

contrappunto” (complaining “that I

did not get an instructor who taught

me the art of counterpoint”).   Lenzi’s

teaching was obviously not what

Mayr was hoping for, since the lat-

ter still hadn’t received any basic

instruction in composition; moreover, as he wrote earlier, in Ingolstadt

he had only been able to hear a few operettas by Hiller and a single

concert in Munich. If we take this account of things in the Cenni seri-

ously, this means that up to the age of 26, Mayr was self-taught. In frus-

tration, Mayr had decided to leave Bergamo and return to Bavaria when

a new Maecenas came into view: Conte Canonico Vincenzo Pesenti.

Pesenti sent Mayr to Venice around 1789-90 to take lessons from

Ferdinando Bertoni at the Conservatorio di Mendicanti, albeit with the

condition that he was to devote himself exclusively to church music.

But it soon turned out that Mayr, who wrote of himself in the Cenni

that at this time he was still a beginner, whereas his peers Paër and

Nasolini were already getting to see their operas staged in Venice, did

not get what he wanted from Bertoni either. Bertoni gave some formal

hints, but didn’t give him any basic instruction. So once again, Mayr

turned to teaching himself; and after Pesenti’s death in 1793, he had

to give harpsichord lessons to earn a living.

In Venice Mayr became acquainted with Piccinni and Peter von

Winter, both of whom encouraged him to compose for the stage. On

February 17, 1794, the premiere of Mayr’s first opera Saffo took place

at the Teatro La Fenice. Previously he had already made a name for © b

y b

IblI

OTE

CA

CIV

ICA

An

gEl

O m

AI E

Ar

CH

IVI S

TOr

ICI,

bEr

gA

mO

57

himself in Venice with his oratorios Iacob a

Labano fugiens (1791), Sisara (1793) and Tobiae

Matrimonium (1794). From 1794 to 1815 Mayr

wrote at least two operas each year, without ever

turning his back on church music.

In fact, Carlo Lenzi had not forgotten his former

pupil, and proposed him as his successor. On May

6, 1802, Mayr was named Maestro di Cappella at

Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, a position he

maintained to the end of his life.

Though Mayr was not granted the happiness

of finding the right teacher himself, it was for just

this reason that he became very engaged with the

training of young people. In 1805, Mayr’s music

school Le Lezioni Caritatevoli di Musica was founded

in Bergamo; alongside his work as Kappellmeister,

he was the school’s director and also responsible for

teaching theory. For his pupils, Mayr wrote works like

solfeggios, songs and arias, as well as a series of stage works, including

Il piccolo compositore di musica. The title role of this two-act Scherzo

musicale was written for Gaetano Donizetti, who began studying at

Mayr’s school in 1806.

Concurrently with his activities in Bergamo, Mayr was writing operas

for most of the leading opera houses across Italy, as well as fulfill-

ing requests to contribute sacred and secular works. His music was

played throughout Europe. The degree of fame Mayr had achieved

at this point in his career is proven by the numerous offers made to

him beginning in 1803. Among others, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Lisbon,

London, Dresden and Milan competed to bring him to their opera

houses. But Mayr did not take up any of these options; he rejected

the offer to become Maestro di Cappella at St. Peters in Rome, as he

did Napoleon’s offer to make him Directeur du Théâtre et des Concerts

with an annual salary of 20,000 francs. Officially, Mayr justified his

refusal saying he didn’t want to ask his wife to live in a foreign country

(in 1804 he had married Lucrezia Venturali, the sister of his first wife

Angiola, who died in 1803).

Mayr formed a warm friendship with his star pupil Donizetti. Once

Donizetti left the Lezioni in Bergamo, the two men engaged in a lively

exchange of letters and references. In 1824, Mayr asked Donizetti for a

contribution to his St. Cecilia festival in Bergamo. From Naples, Donizetti

sent him a Credo in which he clearly alludes to Mayr’s Credo di Novara

(1815). Mayr in turn used parts of Donizetti’s Credo in his Messa a quattro

(1826) written for the Einsiedeln monastery. Following the premiere of

Anna Bolena (1830), Mayr addressed his former pupil as Maestro.

Mayr’s last opera was Demetrio, premiered in Turin in December

1823. For the rest of his life, alongside works for his Lezioni, and a

few commissioned cantatas, Mayr mainly composed church music.

Why Mayr completely turned his back on the stage remains a mystery.

Equally hard to understand is Mayr’s outright refusal to let his church

music be published; in a letter written to Giovanni Ricordi in 1840 he

explained: “e fu costante mio sistema di non dar fuori musica di chiesa”

(“it  has constantly been my intention not to publish church music”).

Mayr died December, 2, 1845 in Bergamo. An eye ailment that led to

near-blindness had made writing almost impossible for him. In his final

years, he occupied himself by copying out some older sacred composi-

tions on paper with widely-ruled staves. Translation: Richard Toop

Left: Autograph

from “Credo

detto di Novara”

Right: Giovanni

Simone Mayr

everyone bows when They heAr mAyr’s nAme.—Gaetano Donizetti in a letter to Mayr

58

PHO

TOS:

dr

(PA

SAd

AS)

/ C

ITE

dE

lA m

uSI

qu

E (P

Ar

rA

)

spanish contEm-porary music surgEs ahEad by jose luis besAdA

Left: Alberto

Posadas

Right: Hèctor Parra

59

Spanish contemporary music has developed remarkably over the

last few decades. More and more Spanish music is performed in the

great European festivals, as highlighted by the CDs produced by record

companies like KAIROS, Col Legno and NEOS. Two main socio-cultural

elements can explain this emergence: firstly, the  support for the devel-

opment of culture in democratic Spain as opposed to the intervention-

ism of Franco’s regime, and, secondly, the improvement of the means

of communication on an international level. Noteworthy among the

composers who lived through the regime change during   their youth

are Francisco Guerrero (Linares, 1951 – Madrid, 1997), sometimes

seen as the “Xenakis español” (“Spanish Xenakis”), José Manuel López

López (born Madrid, 1956), who represents the second spectral gen-

eration, the Galician composer Enrique X. Macías (born 1958 and died

1995 in Vigo), and Mauricio Sotelo (Madrid, 1961), a late disciple of

Nono and deeply linked to the flamenco musical tradition.

In the generation that followed – those who were born between

1965 and 1980 – two authors are particularly valued in the French-

speaking countries and more and more in the German-speaking

area: Alberto Posadas (born Valladolid, 1967) and Hèctor Parra (born

Barcelona, 1976). The work of Posadas, a disciple of Guerrero, is akin to

the musical thinking of Varèse and Xenakis. In some pas-

sages, it is also close to Scelsi’s style and to the French

spectral music genre. The metaphor with several mod-

els external to music is a permanent feature in his work.

The mathematical inspiration spreads widely through-

out his catalogue: the most significant examples are

most probably his cycle of string quartets Liturgia

Fractal (2003-2007) – written for the Quatuor Diotima

– and his ballet Glossopoeia (2009). He also favors

the transfer of ideas from other artistic genres in his

work. Thus, his quintet Nebmaat (2003) was inspired

by the pyramid-shaped architecture in Egypt and

Cuatro escenas negras (2009) and La Lumière du noir

(2010) by works of painters like Francisco de Goya

and Pierre Soulages. As his next creative projects,

Alberto Posadas will complete his new cycle enti-

tled Sombras for the Quatuor Diotima - adding a

soprano and a clarinet - to be performed at the

Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik festival,

and his opera will be premiered in the Teatro Real of Madrid. He is also

working on a concert for three soloists and orchestra commissioned

by the Donausechinger Musiktage, and on the creation of Tenebrae

with Exaudi, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Ircam for the

ManiFeste Festival Biennale of vocal art.

The influence of science and fine arts is also evident in Parra’s work,

but the musical thinking of the Catalan composer is more linked to

the works of composers like Ferneyhough. Scenic music is recurrent

in his catalogue, as shown in Zangezi (2007) based on a text of the

futurist Russian Velimir Khlebnikov, and in Hypermusic Prologue (2009),

with the participation of the famous theoretical physicist Lisa Randall

in the writing of the libretto. Parra is currently working with writer

Marie NDiaye on the creation of new scenic projects: a production of

the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, of the Ircam, and of the Ensemble

Intercontemporain, and another premiere for the Münchener Biennale.

He is also collaborating with Händl Klaus on a major opera for the

Schwetzinger Festspiele. As for the instrumental music, Parra’s style

combines a use of densities and phrasing akin to romantic music but in

a fully current sound context, as shown in his pieces Caressant l’horizon

(2011) and Early Life (2010). Caressant l’horizon is mainly inspired by

the astrophysics of black holes, and Early Life - a work commissioned by

the Ernst von Siemens Foundation after he received the Composition

prize - from theories of Cairns-Smith prebiotic evolution.

Nevertheless, Posadas and Parra are not isolated cases in the

Spanish creative panorama. An entire generation of new composers

is getting remarkable recognition at both national and international

level. It is also true of Jesús Torres (born Zaragoza, 1965) with his

notable neoclassical touch, of Ramon Lazkano (born San Sebastián,

1968), one of the most skillful Spanish orchestrators born in the 20th

century, José María Sánchez-Verdú (born Algeciras, 1968), able to

associate the Lachenmannian style with the Arab-Andalusian influ-

ence, and Elena Mendoza (born Sevilla, 1973), who specializes in

musical theater works.

In short, and despite the consequences of the economic crisis in

Spain and its big impact on cultural institutions, it seems that at least

the creative continuity of this generation has established itself in

Europe and will continue to play a substantial part in international cre-

ative life for many years to come.

Editions Durand Salabert Eschig, partners of the 2012 Oviedo

Concorso with  Orquesta   Filarmonía de Oviedo and Maestro Marzio

Conti, are happy to publish the   First National Young Composers

Prize, Guillermo Martinez’  Rapsodia para violin y orquesta.

60

Orchestras merging in Germany,

dramatic cuts in public subsidies

in Spain and Italy, cultural budgets

based on compensation for “private

copying” endangered throughout

Europe with France and Austria at

the forefront: the economic crisis

is now having a strong impact on

contemporary music and is steadily

reconfiguring the balance between

public funding and private initia-

tives, protected repertoire and the

public domain, and, in general, the

entire value chain of our profession.

Although the decision makers and

the general public are usually only

aware of the surface reactions, com-

posers who are involved in their art

for the long term often know how to

enrich the profession with their per-

spective and “political” (in a broad

sense) talents. France is a beacon

for “cultural exception” which it has

defended in international commer-

cial negotiations for two decades.

The central figure in the front line

of that effort is Laurent Petitgirard,

a composer published in the Durand

collection, who, in parallel with his

musical creations (his Concerto for

saxophone is due to be premièred

next March) and his artistic directorship of the Colonne Orchestra in

Paris, is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the French Society of

Authors, Composers and Publishers (SACEM). Along with composers

like Wolfgang Rihm in Germany, few creators could better describe

the arsenal which a European authors’ rights society like SACEM (the

“armed wing” of  “French cultural exception”), uses to help contem-

porary music to defend itself in the best possible way during this

period of economic turbulence. Laurent Petitgirard spoke with Eric

Denut about the current situation and his vision of the future:

Composers must be committed

“I’ve noticed that a change

of activity is as good as a rest

from the previous one. If I had

to compose for fourteen hours

a day I think that my head

might explode; on the other

hand if I had to work on copy-

right for fourteen hours a day,

I’d probably not be here any-

more. Alternating between

one and the other requires a few presuppositions and constraints

but I find it regenerative. As an artist living in France, a country of

“tags,” the principal difficulty resides in not allowing oneself to be

reduced to one’s most visible activity, or to a “stereotype.”

To be confined in this way can play tricks even with artists of

the calibre of a Leonard Bernstein or an André Previn (who,

for example, is rarely invited to our country).

Copyright is getting harder and harder to manage and

requires knowledge of a growing number of parameters.

Can creative people claim to be able to master such a con-

stantly growing volume of knowledge? Probably not. In order

to be efficient on the board of a company like SACEM, the

Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungsrechte (GEMA), etc.,

you must have reached the point where you can understand

many of the things that you will be called upon to deal with

and also can envisage things that you will not be able to deal with.

Only once you have enough knowledge to estimate the extent of

your own ignorance can you delegate intelligently. The composers,

authors and editors comprising a Board like that of SACEM must

share ideas of a specific ethic, of a specific vision, of a specific com-

mitment to precision in redistribution (this is one element, among Enco

rE:

composers commiTTed To The defence of auThors’ righTs: an inTerview wiTh composer laurenT peTiTgirard

Concerto pour saxophone alto

et orchestre

World premiere on March 12,

2013 in Douai (France), with the

Orchestre de Douai conducted

by Laurent Petitgirard and

Michel Supéra on the saxophone

61

PH

OTO

: Jea

n-B

aPT

isTe

Mil

lOT

others, of the European cultural exception and accordingly costs

a little more in management fees).It follows, then, that, facing the

complexity of the stakes connected with the evolution of copyright

and technology, creative people need the support of a general man-

ager who can and must have his own vision, modulated by the Board

who watches over its fair implementation.

Once this framework is drawn out it seems to me that, for a com-

poser who feels in a position to do so, it is a duty to commit oneself

to a society like SACEM, even if it is only for a short time. Otherwise it

means that the keys to the management of authors’ rights and those

authors’ societies who exist to defend and to give it life

are left to pure technicians. You can see where this has

led in some cases....”

The incarnation of the “cultural exception:” SACEM’s

arsenal for the defence of contemporary art music

“There is a consensus of opinion within the Board

about solidarity between musical styles:  contemporary

pop music, film scores, to cite just a few examples,

support the more demanding musical styles. For tele-

vision, the multiplying factors, upon which are based

the subsequent distribution, are ten times greater

for contemporary music than for background music.

Certain authors’ societies throughout the world do

not do this. This solidarity needs to be preserved at

all cost. But it remains fragile: for example, this year, I am the sole

composer representative of contemporary music on the Board – it

is also interesting to note that I am its chairman, but surely this

should not hide a certain structural fragility in the representation

of modern music.

Cultural budget of the SACEM is the other essential flank in the

defensive line for this music. Of the 18 million (Euros) of funds, which

originate in part (€3 million) from a free allocation from the Board and

for the greater part (the remaining €15 million) from the “cultural 25

percent” levied on “private copying”, 30 percent is devoted to sup-

porting contemporary art music, without any relation to income levels.

The current crisis, which also affects contemporary popular music, of

course, makes greater demands for support from their representatives

and artists; so this substantial share is very likely to be reduced even if

we want it to remain significant.”

The immediate threat

“The most immediate threat comes from the fact that an objec-

tion raised by Austria (where 50 percent of the sums levied under

the “private copying” legislation are designated to support “cultural

initiatives”) could lead to the sums levied for “private copying” being

put into question by the European Court of Justice. If the decision of

the Court were unfavourable, it would have dramatic consequences for

contemporary music in a country like France and elsewhere. I can’t see

the European states compensating this loss in any way with the state

of public finances today.

This means that in this dossier, as Chairman of the SACEM, I have to

lobby national and European politicians; of course, being a musician

from a background of classical music gives me access to these people

in a different way than if I were a musician from a more “commercial”

background. The fact that no one suspects me of having a large income

with my activity as a composer of art music puts me in a better position

to make people understand and accept that I am defending principles

rather than my own interests.”

Contemporary music and the political elite

“It would be a mistake to underestimate the difficulty of defending

our music before our political elite. One sign among many others: our

ex-Président de la République Jacques Chirac confessed to listening to

Le Marteau sans Maître by Pierre Boulez. We all know this is probably

only partly true, but it was well received in our profession: there was in

this confession, be it true or not, the determination for a requirement

for culture, of a kind of curiosity. I do not wish to be cruel but should

we perhaps talk about the playlists of our two last candidates to the

presidency? There weren’t even any attempts to include repertoire

works by Debussy or Ravel....”

Authors’ Rights Societies as laboratories for the future

“SACEM is a place where creative people and revenues from very dif-

ferent worlds cohabit: one world that must be profitable and another

world that is mostly subsidized. Just like other authors’ societies

throughout Europe it is at the heart of the problem music is encoun-

tering today and so it can observe the workings, the common ground

and the differences between these two worlds which meet where

patronage and other private support is involved. In the world of con-

temporary music, the subsidized part has taken on such importance

that the crisis is perceived only when subsidy is threatened and not

when audiences are undermined. In the general context of narrow-

ing subsidies, SACEM and other authors’ societies experience of the

“commerce” (in the noble sense of the word) of the musical world will

rapidly become precious to contemporary music, for example in the

domain of the application of music to image (where practices remain

frequently rather archaic in orchestral and lyrical institutions). I hope

that the “subsidised world” will rapidly come to a greater awareness of

the changing conditions.”

Laurent Petitgirard

62

JANUARY

18

Vinko Globokar

L’Éxil No. 1

for soprano and

ensemble, Hannover

21

Fabien Lévy

Après tout for

vocal ensemble and

instruments, Berlin

26

Azio Corghi, Preludio

‘ad una stella’,

for voice and five

instruments, Busseto

27

Younghi Pagh-Paan

Der Glanz des Lichtes.

Double Concerto

Berlin

FEBRUARY

2

Adam Schoenberg

Picture Etudes

for orchestra,

Kansas City

Giacomo Meyerbeer

Vasco da Gama

(L’Africaine) (opera),

Chemnitz

3

Matteo Franceschini

Voce (cello concerto),

Paris

14

Michel Decoust

12 orchestrations of

Satie’s piano works,

Mondeville

Samir Odeh-Tamimi,

String Quartet,

Oldenburg

Matteo Franceschini

Divertimento

(I Quartetto) for

string quartet, Rome

17

Fabio Nieder

Schlafendes

Papierfrauenobjekt

auf Augenhoehe,

Hannover

MARCH

2

Giuseppe Verdi

Un giorno di regno

(critical edition),

Sarasota

3

Ian Wilson

Minsk (chamber

opera), Heilbronn

5

Benoit Mernier

La Dispute (opera),

Brussels

8

Pascal Dusapin

Aufgang (violin

concerto), Cologne

Dai Fujikura

my butterflies for

wind orchestra,

Chicago

9

Vinko Globokar,

Kaleidoskop im Nebel

for ensemble, Bergen

Laurent Petitgirard

Saxophone Concerto,

Douai

22

Philippe Manoury

Melencolia (String

Quartet No. 3),

Monte Carlo

28

Giampaolo Testoni

Terza Sinfonia,

Ljubljana

APRIL

13

Azio Corghi

Elena for choir,

Biella

Silvia Colasanti

Chichino e Cicotta

(opera for children)

Milan

14

Rudolf Kelterborn

Sinfonie No. 5 “La

Notte”, Basel

21

Volker Heyn

eclipse of reason for

voice, ensemble and

fixed media, Cologne

27

Fabien Levy

Towards the Door

We Never Opened for

saxophone quartet,

Witten

28

Alberto Colla

Symphonie des

Prodiges, Paris

(selecTion)

29

Rolf Riehm

Pasolini in Ostia

for ensemble,

Los Angeles

63

JUNE

1

Gérard Zinstag Seul,

l’écho for voice

and ensemble,

Copenhagen

11

Alexandre Desplat

Poème symphonique

after Pelléas &

Mélisande, Nantes

Alberto Posadas

new work for vocal

and chamber

ensemble, Paris

7

Philippe Schoeller

Songs from Esstal for

soprano and large

orchestra, Paris

8

Mauro Lanza

Ludus de morte regis

for choir, Paris

25

Eric Tanguy

Organ Concerto,

Caen

JULY

23

Carlo Boccadoro

Antigone (ballet),

Bozen

AUGUST

1

Guo Wenjing

Three Scenes of

Chinese opera, Sion

24

Dai Fujikura

New work for

soprano and string

quartet, Salzburg

26

Olga Neuwirth

New work for soprano

and ensemble, Salzburg

SEPTEMBER

20

Fabio Vacchi

Triple Concerto for

two flutes, harp and

orchestra, Bari

Georges Aperghis

Wild romance

for soprano and

orchestra, Oslo

Marc Monnet Violin

Concerto, Strasbourg

OCTOBER

1

Fabio Vacchi

Veronica Franco for

soprano, actor and

orchestra, Milan

4

Georges Aperghis

Four etudes for

orchestra, Cologne

19

Luca Francesconi

Piano Concerto,

Porto

Philippe Manoury

new work for ensem-

ble and orchestra,

Donaueschingen

Alberto Posadas

Concerto for three

woodwinds and

orchestra,

Donaueschingen

20

Georges Aperghis:

Situations. Soirée

musicale for

large ensemble,

Donaueschingen

20

Enno Poppe

Speicher I-VI for

large ensemble,

Donaueschingen

25

Zoltán Jeney: new

work for flute and

orchestra, Budapest

NOVEMBER

Posadas and

Fujikura,

Huddersfield

DECEMBER

9

Marc Monnet

Trio n° 3, Paris

10

Philippe Hersant

Vêpres à la Vierge

(cantata), Paris

six composers

Out at Sea (chamber

opera), Budapest

Francesca Verunelli

The narrow corner for

orchestra, Paris

13

Philippe Manoury

Concerto for two

pianos and

orchestra, Munich

MAY

1

Robert HP Platz

Branenwelten 1 + 5 +

6 for pf, perc, strgs,

electronics, Cologne

Michel Roth, MOI for

ensemble, Cologne

5

Sergej Newski

new work for two

sopranos and

ensemble, Bodø

7

Enno Poppe

Koffer (Suite from

“IQ”), Cologne

11

Giacinto Scelsi

Kamakala for

orchestra, Florence

29

Michel Tabachnik

Lumières fossiles for

orchestra, Paris

64

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Editio Musica Budapest

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Universal Music Publishing Classical

Silke Hilger

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© Universal Music Publishing Classical, 2013

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