Programmaboekje 30.10.2012 Het Collectief

Het Collectief

12|13

30.10.2012 New Music Series 3/5

Wegens de grote opkomst van publiek uit het buitenland is het programmaboekje van dit concert in het Engels opgemaakt.

Practical

20u15 21u15 21u20

Pre-talk | foyer Start concert | concert hall Concert end (approx.)

Interview with composers and musicians | foyer

There is no break.

ISCM World Music Days 2012 ISCM World Music Days is an international festival of contemporary music. Each year, the festival is organized in a different country by one of the sections of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In 2012, Belgium hosts this ‘world expo’ of contemporary music from October 25th to November 4th in its major performing arts centers. During the festival a symphonic orchestra, 22 ensembles and soloists will play 33 concerts in 6 different cities (Brussels, Leuven, Mons, Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp) and will feature works of more than 150 composers from 46 countries. The program for this edition of the WMD is composed in cooperation with the Belgian partner ensembles and concert organizations. Through an international Call for Works, the festival is an invitation to discover a broad spectrum of works and composers.

In Ghent the festival is hosted 30 & 31 October by Logos Foundation, Bijloke Music Centre and Handelsbeurs Concert Hall.

Handelsbeurs organizes two concerts during the festival: 30.10.2012 (17h00) Ensemble Besides 30.10.2012 (20h15) Het Collectief

Programme Evis SAMMOUTIS (1979) Metioron for clarinet, piano, violin, cello (2010) George BENJAMIN (1960) Flight for flute solo (1979) Vykintas BALTAKAS (1972) (how does the silver cloud s)ou(nd) for piano solo (2006) Steve REICH (1936) New York Counterpoint (1985) Oleg PAIBERDIN (1971) Guo hua for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano (2009)

Het Collectief Wibert Aerts | violin Benjamin Dieltjens | clarinet Thomas Dieltjens | piano Toon Fret | flute Martijn Vink |cello

30.10.2012 | Het Collectief

Imaginary conversations in changing places

By Hannah Aelvoet In this concert Het Collectief presents a program with a global dimension. First of all, there are of course the different nationalities of the performed composers, including Cyprus, Russia, Great Britain, Lithuania and the United States. Secondly, certain nationalistic, regional and citybased tendencies are exposed during the concert, whether or not indirectly, like the political issues in Cyprus, the Chinese philosophical thought of ‘being’ instead of the western ‘becoming’, and the eternal movement of a grand city like New York.

And then, there is the imagination of the listener, which is, without any doubt, the greatest continent of all.

To balance and to move forward

Let us start by introducing the youngest artist of the evening: Evis Sammoutis (1979) was born in Cyprus. After achieving his performance and teaching diploma’s in guitar and piano, he went to Great Britain where he obtained a Bachelor of

Music at the University of Hull and a PhD in Music Composition at the University of York, being coached by Thomas Simaku.

Afterwards he followed several workshops, including those in Darmstadt, at the IRCAM and at the Centre Acanthes in Metz, led by Helmut Lachenmann, George Aperghis, Jonathan Harvey, Brian Ferneyhough, George Benjamin and many more.

Metioron (2010), for clarinet, flute, piano and cello, premiered last year at the Pharos Contemporary Music Festival in Cyprus. It is originally written to celebrate 50 years of Cypriot independency.

The title is quite difficult to translate.

Although ‘metioron’ (Μετήορον) is the old Greek version of ‘meteoro’ (Μετέωρο), the composition is not trying to represent a meteor. Rather, it means ‘suspended’, or ‘hanging in the air’. The work is built on several fragments, a sort of amalgamation of different types of sound, going from tones and extremely virtuosic passages to

noise and percussive elements. In itself these fragments seem instable and fragile, but yet they are organically interconnected; at times they literally form each other’s echo. Along the way the little pieces of music come closer to one another, supported by the quest for an equilibrium between the four instruments – with regards to their timbre as well as their general function in the piece. This process of balancing between the four instruments is the breeding ground for the formal development of Metioron.

Besides, Sammoutis thought it was quite a challenge to write some music to celebrate the Cypriot anniversary. It was a little ironic, considering the ongoing political problem the country had been suffering from. Metioron greatly reflects this attitude, as Sammoutis illustrates: “Cyprus is itself still Metiori. Like this work, its democracy is fragile, hanging in the air, and it is this aspect of a nation struggling to find its feet, to balance and to move forward that ultimately inspired and shaped this piece.”

Pictures of Chinese hieroglyphs and birds

The Russian composer Oleg Paiberdin (1971) started his career as his father’s pupil at the Karatau Music Children School. In 2005 he moved to Moskou, where he still works at the Moskou State Philharmonic. Paiberdin’s musical language is sometimes called simple; he regularly uses diatonic technics, experimenting mainly in terms of timbre and varying textures. In Guo Hua (2009) this particular ‘Paiberdinian’ diatonicism gets a pentatonic shape: after a few minutes a soft, five tone motive is emerging, follo-

wed by a monotone threnody that grows in dissonance as the piece continues, striving for a climax in the end. Among other Asian influences, the pentatonic theme refers to the represented Chinese culture already revealed in the title: ‘Guo Hua’ is a type of Chinese art, whereby a poetical text is turned into a drawing through hieroglyphs, and the drawing, in turn, is sometimes transformed into a piece of music.

Although this sounds like programmatic music, Paiberdin’s Guo Hua is not associated with a drawing or text – or at least not explicitly.

Another evocation is to be heard in Flight (1979) for solo flute. Basically this piece pencils birds in their flight. Speaking of birds, it was approximately at that time that its creator, George Benjamin (1960), finished his studies with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in Paris.

Between wishing and not daring

The Lithuanian Vykintas Baltakas (1972) travelled to Karlsruhe and ended up in Leuven. On the way he studied composition and direction with Wolfgang Rihm, Andreas Weiss en Peter Eötvös, and gradually, he peeled off his artistic Lithuanian roots. Considering Baltakas, the Lithuanian heritage misses a certain ‘impertinence’, which he wishes to include in his own modernistic language.

On his website, Baltakas is called a “musical Scheherazade”, because “he weaves musical stories that are linked with a delicate interconnected web.” His composition (How does the silver cloud s)ou(nd?)

(2006) is interwoven with the rest of his oeuvre in the same way. It is a further elaboration of Ouroboros (2004) and the cycle that sprang from it: Ouroboros – Zyclus

I (2005). In the Ouroboros-cycle, Baltakas investigates certain aspects of Ouroboros – colors, musical layers, rhythmical structures, harmonic proportions – to discover specific tendencies and develop them further in one way or another. Because the musical material has that much of potential, the cycle can move in a myriad of ways. As a matter of fact, this potential explains the title of the piece, for an ouroboros is an ancient symbol that represents a snake eating its own tail, forming a circle that constantly recreates itself.

(How does the silver cloud s)ou(nd?) takes a closer look at the piano part from Ouroboros. Literally, it takes the “ou” out of Ouroboros; that explains the brackets.

(Other separate studies are (Co)ro(na), for a little ensemble, and b(ell tree), for string quartet.) In the Ouroboros-cycle, the piano holds a certain distance towards the main part of the happening: most of the time it has an accompanying or commenting function. Baltakas took up an interest in what the piano would say, if it could talk.

Initially, Baltakas wanted to create a conversation between piano and tape, but eventually the tape-part was omitted. And from this point of view (How does the silver cloud s)ou(nd?) can be interpreted as a conversation in which one voice is missing. It is up to the listener to fantasize what the piano is answering to. In this way the piece is an ‘imaginary duet’ between the imagination of the listener and the soft comments of the piano. The piano part is soft indeed, as Baltakas states: (How does the silver cloud s)ou(nd?) is “some small living thing, which is between wishing and not daring.”

Finally, there is only one piece left to comment, making a radical change from a small living thing to a very large living

thing: New York, the city where one of the first masters of repetitive music, Steve Reich (1936), was born and raised. After Vermont Counterpoint (1982) for flute and tape, New York Counterpoint (1985) for clarinet and tape is the second piece in the series of solo instruments and tape.

In New York Counterpoint one clarinetist plays eleven parts, using both the clarinet and the bass clarinet. Ten parts are recorded on tape in advance, forming a layered structure, and the eleventh one is usually played over the tape in concert. The way in which the Reichian repetitive pattern is completed, reminds of his earlier work: the pulse in the opening bars comes back from Music for 18 musicians (1976) and the process of a shifting pattern already rises in Piano phase and Violin phase (1967). There are three parts in New York Counterpoint, played after each other without a pause: a slow movement, a fast movement and again a slow movement.

The meter seems to be changing throughout the work, but that’s only an illusion; accents shift in order to change the perception of what essentially stays the same.

As a master in musicology, Hannah Aelvoet is currently occupied with the heritage of the library of the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, where she is studying the piano as well.

Biography The chamber music group Het Collectief was founded in 1998 in Brussels. Working consistently from a solid nucleus of five musicians, the group has created an intriguing and idiosyncratic sound, achieved by an unfamiliar mix of strings, wind instruments and piano.

As regards repertoire, Het Collectief returns to the Second Viennese School, the roots of modernism. Starting from this solid basis, it explores important twentieth century repertoire, including the very latest experimental trends. In addition to that, the group creates a furore with daring crossovers between contemporary and traditional compositions and with adaptations of ancient music. The group’s affinity with innovative twentieth

century music has been widely recognized by the international music press, witness the many laudatory reviews that greeted the release of several CD’s, including works of Schoenberg, Bach, Messiaen, Kee Yong Chong and Bart Vanhecke. A fifth CD ‘12x12, A Musical Zodiac’ was released in March 2012. Next to the many concert platforms in Belgium, Het Collectief regularly brings its productions to concert venues abroad, including The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France, Poland, Austria, South America and Asia.

Het Collectief was awarded the KLARA prize 2011 of ‘Musician of the Year’. www.hetcollectief.be

Next in concert: Llŷr Williams (piano) F. Schubert, A. Schönberg, J. Brahms, A. Webern vr 09.11.2012

Handelsbeurs Concertzaal Handelsbeurs Concertzaal is a concert venue in the city center of Ghent. It’s concert program represents a wide variety of styles and genres such as pop, rock, blues, jazz and classical music.

The classical music series focuses on chamber music from 1750 till now and includes five to six special concerts

dedicated to contemporary classical music.

As a result of their close cooperation since years, the Belgian ensemble for contemporary music Ictus presents each season at Handelsbeurs Concertzaal two projects in which they combine 20th and new music in an original format.

Text Hannah Aelvoet | Photo Llŷr Williams © Sussi Ahlburg | Coordination programme notes Handelsbeurs Concertzaal | V.U.: Stefaan D’haeze © Handelsbeurs Concertzaal, Kouter 29, 9000 Gent