Kammer Klang returns for a first 2014 concert in March, with two iconic, iconoclastic pieces by legendary Hungarian composer György Ligeti, Mysteries of the Macabre and Musica Ricercata, the haunting piano tune featured in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, accompanied by Sky-me, Type-me, for four megaphoned voices by Jagoda Szmytka, a young and up-and-coming Polish composer based in Germany. The night will end with a session of free improvisation with Jamie Coleman, Ross Lambert and Guillaume Viltard.

PROGRAMME:

György Ligeti – Mysteries of the Macabre (1974-1997)

Antoine Françoise – piano
Toby Street – trumpet
Serge Vuille – percussions

Jagoda Szmytka – Sky-me, type-me (2011)

Ana gasco, Elsa Bradley, Jonathan French, Serge Vuille – megaphones
Mark Knoop – conducting

György Ligeti – Musica Ricercata (1951-1953) Gwen Rouger – piano

Free improvisation
Jamie Coleman – trumpet
Ross Lambert – guitar
Guillaume Viltard – double bass




GYÖRGY LIGETI

György Ligeti was one of those great pioneering spirits of the post-war era who created whole new ways of devising and perceiving music. Yet, unlike Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono, he had no taste for strident manifestos, disliked ideologies of any kind and preferred to remain unattached to schools or movements.

That quality of being an outsider was instilled very young. Ligeti was born in 1923 into a small Jewish community in a part of Transylvania whose culture was partly Hungarian and partly Romanian. Isolated by anti-Semitism, he took refuge in a rich inner world. He enrolled at the conservatory at Cluj, where he discovered Bartók’s quartets, which influenced him profoundly.

During the war, Ligeti was put into a Jewish forced-labour unit which narrowly avoided being liquidated; his father and brother both perished in concentration camps. After the war, he enrolled at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and later taught there. Ligeti responded to the repressive nature of the Communist regime by going into ‘internal exile’. For public consumption he composed in the official populist style; privately, he was groping his way towards a new musical language. When the Soviets invaded in 1956, Ligeti fled to Austria. From there he went to Cologne, spent six weeks with Stockhausen, and soon established a reputation as a brilliant theorist of new music and the composer of a handful of witty pieces in a medium not noted for its wit: electronics.

What really put him on the map were the orchestral pieces Apparitions (1959) and Atmosphères (1961), which first revealed that beguiling Ligeti world of murmuring textures and sudden, sinister comic shocks. He produced a whole series of works with a Dadaist flavour, including Aventures (1962, rev. 1963) and Nouvelles aventures (1962–5). During the 1960s and 1970s he elaborated his idea of ‘micropolyphony’ in works of ever-increasing aural refinement and emotional amplitude, including the Cello Concerto (1966), the Chamber Concerto (1969–70) and San Francisco Polyphony (1974–7, rev. 1996). His opera Le grand macabre (1978) transformed and satirised numerous other musics, from Monteverdi to Wagner.

After a creative hiatus, the Horn Trio (1982) announced a new direction, with complex polyrhythms, experiments in nontempered tuning and a new, overt expressivity. The key works of this period are the Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto (1985–8 and 1989–93), the Hamburg Concerto (1998–9, rev. 2000), and the dazzling series of 18 piano Études. The charming yet profound set of Hungarian songs, Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel – written in 2000 – was the last work Ligeti composed before illness silenced him.

(Ivan Hewett © BBC)




JAGODA SZMYTKA

Jagoda Szmytka's music has been featured in such festivals as the Summer Courses for New Music (Darmstadt), Acht Brücken (Cologne), Warsaw Autumn, Sacrum Profanum (Cracow), ENSEMS (Valencia), LOOP (Brussels), and Tokyo Experimental Festival, as well as in performances at ZKM Karlsruhe, Experimental Studio des SWR Freiburg, the Abbaye de Royaumont or ADK Berlin. In 2013 her opera “for hands and voices” was premiered in the Polish National Opera Grand Theatre in Warsaw.

She often collaborates with Ensemble Garage, Ensemble Interface, KWARTLUDIUM, leise Dröhnung, Trio Catch, Eva Boesch, Maciej Frąckiewicz, Małgorzata Walentynowicz, as well as in performances by Bang on a Can All-Stars, ensemble l'arsenale, Ensemble Besides, EWCM, Grup Instrumental de Valencia, IEMA, Les Cris de Paris, and MCME. In 2011 she was composer-in-residency at ZKM Karlsruhe and in 2012 at La Muse en Circuit Paris. Current projects include commissions for the ECLAT Festival Stuttgart (Ensemble Recherche), Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Trio Catch), Lucerne Festival (Lucerne Festival Ensemble) and a music theatre piece for the Summer Courses for New Music Darmstadt/Wien Modern (Ensemble Interface). In 2015 a portrait CD will be released by Edition Zeitgenössische Musik/WERGO.

Jagoda Szmytka has received scholarships and grants from various foundations, among others: ÖAAD, DAAD, a scholarship from the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation, Alfred-Töpfer-Stipendium, the Wolfgang Rihm Scholarship of the Hoepfner Foundation, an artist grant funded by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. In 2012 she received The Staubach Honoraria from the IMD (International Music Institute Darmstadt) and is the Kranichstein Stipend holder 2012. In 2013 Szmytka held a fellowship at the Herrenhaus Edenkoben.


JAMIE COLEMAN / trumpet

Sleepless nights, storytelling, radio phone-ins, an out of tune piano, old jazz records, puddle-splashing, sticky valves, neighbour issues, west-London issues, traffic jams, tax return fears, a loving family and persistence will all play a part in my presence on this night.

'Conditions: A Bright Nowhere' is available from Matchless Recordings.

www.myspace.com/jamieimprov
www.matchlessrecordings.com



ROSS LAMBERT / guitar

Northern Irish (and London-based) guitarist and ‘magnetic and vibrating sources’ player Ross Lambert, has in his own words, the following fundamental and simultaneous approaches to live performance: to play as though it was both the first time and also the last; and to able to differentiate between what is good and worth conserving and what is not. Ross has been involved in, initiated and been a connector between a very wide variety of improvisatory music since his first exposure and (immediate) commitment to it, in Sheffield via Derek Bailey during the mid-1980s. Although under-recorded (he claims ‘by choice’), Ross has worked with a huge number of musicians from around the world, including Tetuzi Akiyama, Ami Yoshida, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Paul Hession, Rhodri Davies, John Butcher and Evan Parker, as well as his close friends Eddie Prevost, Seymour Wright, and Sebastian Lexer.



GUILLAUME VILTARD / double bass

"Born in 1975 in the North of Ivory Coast, I grew up in a wild countryside with almost no music. Back in France ten years later, I felt much better roaming through woodlands than attending school. Nonetheless I did my best, but a double bass finally came to me in the mid 90's. It is almost like a tree. I have been working hard to play properly for another ten years or so. I hate exams and any kind of competition but I survived classical training and even jazz playing. I like the idea that I could give up with music and do something completely different but it may be wrong. Nice also to think about aesthetics, choices or freedom and being only an experiment in the musical life of one’s very instrument."



unrevenu.free.fr
www.myspace.com/londoneuropeantrio
www.myspace.com/oldandnewdreams
www.cafeoto.co.uk/associated-artists.shtm

GWEN ROUGER / piano

Gwen Rouger, pianist, conceives the concert as a moment of experimentation, as much for the audience as for the performer; a time and space in which questions are expressed through engaging the senses. This explorative approach provides the creative impetus for the development of her performances, which bring together notated contemporary composition, improvisation, live electronics and installation. French pianist Gwen Rouger completed her initial training in Paris and received her Diplôme d'Études Musicales in 2005. Her interest in Contemporary music and its aesthetic discourse led her to pursue four years of further studies with the composer and pianist Carlos Roque Alsina. In order to pursue her research interests in greater depth, Rouger is currently undertaking a Masters degree in Contemporary music performance at the Royal College of Music in London. In 2008, Rouger was a finalist in the Xavier Montsalvatge International piano competition for contemporary music performance and since has played as a soloist or as a chamber music member in a number of venues internationally, including the Palace of Congress (Girona, Spain), the Arsenal (Metz, France), the 104 (Paris, France), Cadogan Hall and Cafe OTO (London, UK). She particularly enjoys collaborating with young composers, which has resulted in her premiering many of their works. She is co-artistic director and pianist of the new music ensemble soundinitiative. (www.soundinitiative.fr).