KLANGFORUM WIEN II.
The second evening of the Prague Offspring series presents premieres of five new works by Czech and Slovak composers written for Klangforum Wien, commemorates the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, and climaxes with the Czech premiere of Nether, a dazzling work by the composer-in-residence Rebecca Saunders. Appearing as the work’s soloist is Juliet Fraser, the phenomenal British soprano who inspires today’s best composers.
Programme
- Kaija Saariaho: Solar
- World premiere of works commissioned by the Prague Spring:
- Matěj Sloboda: 60 noch kleinere Orchesterstückchen
- Michal Wróblewski: Durée
- Michal Indrák: Generated Answers
- Tímea Urban Hvozdíková: microdot
- Martin Klusák: In D: Echoes of the Beech Mountain
- Rebecca Saunders: Nether
Performers
- Klangforum Wien
- Enno Poppe - conductor
- Juliet Fraser - soprano
- Markus Wallner - sound engineer
News of Kaija Saariaho’s death on 2 June 2023 saddened the entire music world. The Finnish composer built upon the principles of spectral music, and with her own poetic language she combined those ideas with her own personal conception of harmony and melody. In Prague, Enno Poppe will lead Klangforum Wien in a performance of her composition Solar (1993). The composer wrote: “Solar is based on the idea of an ever present harmonic structure, which radiates an image around it and forces the harmony over and over again back to its original form, as if following the laws of gravity. The piece is named after this idea. This solar harmony is then contrasted with a very different kind of harmonic principle, based more on polarities.”
The highpoint of the concert will be the Czech premiere of a composition by Rebecca Saunders titled Nether for soprano, 19 instrumental soloists, and conductor. The work is an independent, expanded “module” of the vast spatial performance Yes, which was premiered in 2017 at the Berliner Philharmonie and drew the attention of the contemporary music world to the composer. According to Saunders, “Yes refers to Molly Bloom’s monologue, the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This monologue can be regarded as a kind of literary collage, a web woven from the innumerable paths traced by stories, thoughts, associations, and moments in a continuous, unrelenting high-energy stream: a snapshot, a state of being before and during the act of falling asleep, amid glimmerings of the subconscious.” At first hearing, it might seem that in the composition, Saunders treats the human voice like an instrument. The virtuosic part makes extraordinary demands on the soloist, and the emitted sounds combine with the actions of the instruments. However, we could just as easily say that Saunders treats the musical instruments like voices; not like a singing voice, but instead like a voice that articulates a broad spectrum of sounds. This is just what connects her music with the writings of James Joyce, who was fascinated by the sonic quality of speech. Hearing the work performed by Juliet Fraser, who gave its premiere, promises to be an extraordinary experience.
