Monday 27 April 2015, 8pm
Mats Lindström presents a very special live multi-channel diffusion of the first half of Hungarian composer Ákos Rózmann's monumental long-form work, Tolv Stationer (Twelve Stations).
Epic in scale, timbre, technique, mood and movement, Twelve Stations is a unique masterpiece of 20th Century musique concrète and presents itself as an intensely personal and bold realm of sound, an offering as such, a radical mass open to all.
“Man meets different difficulties and sufferings through his wandering. These are forces between which a continuous struggle is going on. He cannot control and preside over these forces. He is being tossed up and down, powerless, like snowflakes in the storm: chaotic thoughts and feelings, gladness and suffering, which flow without intermission like a river that has no beginning nor end. All these are the fruits of our own deeds. However, in this life you have the chance to make easier those life wanderings that are to come.” – Rózmann (from the programme notes for the 1984 premiere of the first seven stations).
Ákos Rózmann was born in Hungary in 1939. He studied composition and took his organist’s and composer’s diploma at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. Between 1971 and 1974 he studied composition with Ingvar Lidholm at the State Academy of Music in Stockholm. He became organist of the Catholic Cathedral in Stockholm in 1978.
"The lingering feeling after hearing the works of Ákos Rózmann is the intangibility of naming what that lingering feeling is. Anyone who hears his music is moved, in as many ways possible, but why they have been moved and where to, is as difficult to put a finger on as to catch a small fleck in a bowl of water, always in sight, but forever slipping from our grasp." – Jim O'Rourke
The uncompromising nature of Rózmann’s character can easily be traced both in the reports about his behaviour and in his music. As a fervent devotee of his work, he shut himself up in windowless studios for hours, often working until late in the night. In his late years he didn’t participate in the events of official musical life, he didn’t even attend his own premieres. In his work, he looked neither for the approval of the professional, nor for the pleasure of the audience. The only thing that counted was the perfect articulation of his vision.
This vision was inspired by the (recorded) sound itself, originating from many different sources. As this raw material had been worked out and made to be specially plastic, an extremely powerful drama evolved, especially in Rózmann’s large-scale works. A drama that reproduces the most basic conflicts of human existence, gives a shocking insight to its darkest dephts, and shows that sin and purity, darkness and light walk side by side, their qualities mutually presupposing each other. The play is often elaborated in a symbolical and pictorial way with quotations from Buddhist and Christian liturgical music on one side, violent clashing, snarling and devilish laughter on the other. Put between these forces, the cry of the struggling human soul is heard.
Mats Lindström works as a composer and a musician, often with strains of live-electronics. He often works with intermedia, scenic elements and visual arts as a complement to the music, and has worked both with music for concerts, theatre and dance as well as radio-art and sound installations. Formerly an engineer in the electronics industry Lindström has designed and constructed a number of unique electronic musical instruments and apparatuses. His LP 'МИГ' - including recordings from the Aviation Engines Museum in St Petersburg and pieces recorded for theatre and at Stockholm's EMS Elektronmusikstudion was released on Ideologic Organ in 2012.
