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KLANGFORUM WIEN I.

For the third time, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague-Holešovice will be the venue for Prague Offspring, a Prague Spring Festival concert format dedicated to the latest in contemporary music. This will be last time that Klangforum Wien will be appearing in the role of ensemble-in-residence. The players of Klangforum Wien have won over the festival public with their fascinating virtuosity, cultivation of tone, and total devotion to the most demanding contemporary music.

Programme

Rebecca Saunders: Fury II, Concerto for solo double bass and ensemble
Enno Poppe: Speicher VI
Rebecca Saunders: to an utterance (study)
Rebecca Saunders: Scar

Performers

Klangforum Wien
Enno Poppe - conductor
Joonas Ahonen - piano
Evan Hulbert - double bass

Price

600 CZK

31 . 5 . 2024

Friday 20.00

Venue

DOX+

Pass - Prague Offspring

In 2024, under the leadership of the conductor and composer Enno Poppe, they will be giving world premieres of five new works commissioned from Czech and Slovak composers by the Prague Spring Festival, and they will commemorate the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho with the passing of exactly one year since her death on 2 June 2023. The players will also be sharing their immense experience with young instrumentalists and composers at workshops and masterclasses. Rebecca Saunders is coming to Prague to serve as composer-in-residence. A British composer living in Berlin, she works with sounds, shaping them like the material of a sculpture. We will also hear music by Enno Poppe.

The first evening will present the Czech premieres of three of her works. She wrote the solo piano study titled to an utterance at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic for the pianist Joonas Ahonen. Next is a concerto for double bass and instrumental ensemble titled Fury II, with Evan Hulbert accompanied by his colleagues. About her composition, Rebecca Saunders wrote: “Fury means rage. An explosion of rage. Endeavouring to release an extreme energy. In a single breath. Fury II depicts a single state or condition, which was inspired by the five-string double bass: fascinated with the low pulsing sounds and the extensive percussive possibilities of the instrument; with the pronounced physicality and passionate gesture of the double bass soloist. Also the pronounced fragility of this instrument in the delicate and expressive upper-range.” The evening will climax with a performance of a composition titled Scar. The title serves as a metaphor that illustrates the composer’s fascination with sound: “Silence is the canvas on which the weight of sound leaves its mark. In Scar, sound rips open the surface of silence, or peels back the skin, zooms in, and falls into the netherworld. Seeking the obscured, that which lies within.”