Keywords: Watch this Space
| Members of the BRSO academy | |
| Korbinian Altenberger | Violin |
| Lukas Maria Kuen | Piano |
| “Black Angels”, Thirteen Images from the Dark Land for Electric String Quartet Thirteen Images from the Dark Land | George Crumb |
| Appalachian Spring (1970), Suite for 13 Instruments | Aaron Copland |
| “Café Music” for Piano, Violin and Cello | Paul Schoenfield |
These events are similar in terms of concept, place, musicians or the program.
The popular “Watch This Space” series will kick off the new season with a tribute to the Twenties. It was an age of vibrant diversity in society and the arts: radio was born, and music faced a rich amalgam of contrasting currents, from the avant-garde to neoclassicism and jazz. Together with artist-in-residence Kirill Gerstein, the young German-Japanese conductor Erina Yashima will tackle the music of this exciting era. After studying at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler University of Music, she worked as an assistant conductor to such figures as Riccardo Muti in Chicago, Yannick Nézet-Seguin in Philadelphia and Zubin Mehta on the BRSO’s Asian tour of 2018. Beginning with the new season she will be the principal conductor of the Komische Oper in Berlin.
BRSO solo oboist Stefan Schilli has been a Friend of the Academy for many years and is wholeheartedly committed to the Academy’s up-and-coming professional musicians. With his program for this Watch-This-Space concert, he not only wants to support the scholarship recipients, but also specifically challenge them – for instance with Mozart’s great serenade for winds, the Gran Partita, whose Adagio is also one of the most beautiful that Mozart ever wrote. Ligeti himself considered the Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet to be “miniature concertos” in which the individual instrumentalists are showcased in particularly striking ways. This is also the case with Bach, where there is an equal juxtaposition of musical lines with different timbres and characteristics.
The Academy has chosen compositions that demand quite special ways of approaching their instruments. Stephen Montague, in Thule Ultima, has the wind quintet play mainly on their mouthpieces, like a concert of exotic birds. George Crumb likewise calls for special timbres in his string quartet Black Angels: written to commemorate the victims of the Vietnam War, this pacifist composer asks the strings to play a quotation from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden using the wood of their bows (col legno), producing a bleak, oppressive tone. Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, written shortly after his emigration from Hungary, reflect his immersion in Western culture. Ravel wrote Le Tombeau de Couperin as funeral music for the great French claveciniste. The movements originated during the First World War, and Ravel soon dedicated each one to a fallen French soldier from his circle of friends – a musical memorial spanning the centuries. His Sonata for Violin and Violoncello is likewise a funeral piece for a deceased composer, Claude Debussy.
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