Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra: Games of Colors

The last of the June in Buffalo resident ensemble's we'll profile is the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.  This year, the BPO continues its annual tradition of closing out the festival with a concert of orchestral works by faculty composers, and this year's program will feature works by Abrahamsen, Felder, Stucky, and Ung, under the direction of BPO music director, JoAnn Falletta.

JoAnn Falletta

Falletta has been praised by the Washington Post as having "Toscanini’s tight control over ensemble, Walter’s affectionate balancing of inner voices, Stokowski’s gutsy showmanship, and a controlled frenzy worthy of Bernstein."  In addition to being the BPO's music director, she directs the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and serves as Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center.  Under her direction, the BPO has recorded frequently for the Naxos label, earning six Grammy nominations, and received a double Grammy Award in 2009 for their recording of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man:  Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2003) with Hila Plitmann.

Sunday's BPO program will open with David Felder's Linebacker Music, a work commissioned by the orchestra during the early-1990s, when the Buffalo Bills were one of the country's most successful teams (making it to the super bowl four consecutive years).  Felder's piece "epitomize[s] the strength, speed, power, and indeed the fury and violence of the game of football."  Herman Trotter of the Buffalo News said of the piece:  "Don't expect Linebacker Music to remind you of The Blue Danube. Wholly consistent with its subject matter, it has a very declamatory opening, then proceeds to be stridently aggressive and percussion-laced, and to convey a feeling of massive strength at all times."  (To read more about the piece, see our interview with the composer).

Chinary Ung's Water Rings "Overture" (1993) will follow.  The work, while much more subdued than his other works (avoiding the dramatic gestures common to the Spirals series), maintains the expressive language the composer is known for.  Ung wrote the work quickly, and it functions as a sort of improvisation, with the composer positioned inside the orchestra, playing it as if it were the traditional Cambodian Pinpeat ensemble.  As such, the piece, as the program note explains, "uses dance rhythms and folk tunes from Cambodia, and while the instrumental writing is not as florid as his other works, the parts are drawn with the same characteristic nuance, elegantly shaped and generously inflected."

Steven Stucky

The concert will close with Jeu de timbres, a brief, single-movement composition by Steven Stucky.  The new music world was shocked and saddened to hear of his death from cancer earlier this year, as he was one of the most widely performed and celebrated American composers.  Stucky was a June in Buffalo regular, and was on the faculty at last year's festival (see our profile of Stucky from last year's series on JiB faculty), at which audiences heard his 2005 Piano Quartet performed by Performance Institute faculty, and Refrains (1979) for percussion quintet realized by Talujon.  This year will mark the second time the BPO has performed Jeu de timbres at the festival, the first being when Stucky himself was on faculty in 2012.  That performance was praised by Allan Kozinn of the New York Times as "packed with shimmering string and woodwind textures yet with a changeability and bite that are among the most recognizable hallmarks of Mr. Stucky’s music."  Stucky himself described the piece as "[spending] most of its energy on rhythmic verve and luminous orchestral colors.  […]  The title (play, or game, of musical colors) both alludes to these Gallic tendencies in general and makes a small, specific inside joke: jeu de timbres is the French name for the orchestra bells or glockenspiel, an instrument that makes an occasional appearance in this piece.  There are other inside jokes, too, including two admiring glances at works by Ravel—one oblique, the other (at the end) quite direct."

We look forward to hearing Buffalo's orchestra close out the festival as it always does, with exciting new works by faculty composers, presenting all variety of dramatic gestures and games of color.

Arditti Quartet: Prolific Collaboration

Arditti Quartet

Few ensembles have made as significant a mark on the world of contemporary composition as the Arditti Quartet.  Since their formation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974, hundreds of pieces have been composed especially for them, and many of these works—by the likes of Andriessen, Birtwistle, Cage, Carter, Ferneyhough, Gubaidulina, Kurtág, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Sciarrino, Stockhausen, and Xenakis among many others—have themselves had significant resonances throughout the music world.  This year, June in Buffalo is excited to count the Ardittis as one of the festival's many renowned resident ensembles.

The Arditti Quartet has received a number of prestigious awards for their contributions to the field, including winning the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis multiple times, as well as Gramophone Awards for "Best Recording of Contemporary Music" in 1999 for recordings of Carter and again in 2002 for recordings of Birtwistle.  Also in 1999, they became the only ensemble to receive the celebrated Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for "Lifetime Achievement" in music.  More recently, they were awarded the "Coup de Coeur" prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for their work in disseminating contemporary music.

Prolific both onstage and in the studio, the Arditti Quartet has recorded over 200 CDs, creating one of the most extensive collections of contemporary quartet literature.  Significant entries include the first digital recordings of the complete string chamber music of the Second Viennese School, the complete chamber music of Xenakis (see below for a classic recording of 1978's Ikhoor), and Stockhausen's (in)famous Helicopter Quartet, among other significant works by the likes of Berio, Nono, Rihm, Harvey, Gerhard, and Paredes.  Because the quartet finds that close collaboration with composers is essential to interpreting the broad spectrum of works in the field, many of these recordings are made with the composers on hand in the studio.  The same is true for their concert performances, as the Ardittis attempt to work with every composer whose music they play.  This ethic expands into their educational work as well:  through masterclasses and workshops for young performers and composers, the quartet has had a significant role in guiding a younger generation of artists around the world.  This will continue at June in Buffalo, as the Ardittis will present two workshops at which they will perform works by emerging composers.

Franco Donatoni

In addition to these workshops, the quartet will present an evening program which will feature works by JiB faculty, alongside Franco Donatoni's La Souris sans sourire ("The Mouse without a Smile," 1988).  Donatoni's work is marked by a comic frenzy, with Carl Stalling-esque evocations of exaggerated gestures and animated pursuits.  The program will also include Joshua Fineberg's La Quintina (2012) a work inspired by the repertoire of Sardinian vocal polyphony in which four singers manage to create an phantom fifth voice via overtones and intonation (for more on this piece, see our profile on Fineberg).  

The program then moves into Hans Abrahamsen's Fourth Quartet, a work originally commissioned for the Ardittis in the early 1990s, but which was only recently completed.  The piece is marked by a quiet, soft music of icy string harmonics, which the composer describes in German as "hoch im Himmel gesungen…" ("High singing in heaven…").  The piece consists of four movements each with their own scordatura.  The opening texture of the first movement treads territory not unlike that of Abrahamsen's Schnee:  high, delicate—even brittle—airy melodies.  The compose describes the following movements:

The second movement is fast and "movement and joy"-like.  It consists of two duets and a reverse-style counterpoint.  […]  "Dark, heavy and earthy" is the third movement and its pizzicato recalls big black raindrops falling to the ground.  It is the dark and grainy counterpart to the first movement, whereas the fourth movement corresponds to the second.  The fourth movement was planned as a dark and heavy counterpart but it turned out to be like "babbling" music of a child.

Finally, the piece will close with the world premiere of David Felder's Netivot, for quartet and electronics, a work that manages an effective balance between dense virtuosity and pensive reflection through an evocative harmonic language extracted from vowel formants.  (More on this piece in our upcoming profile of David Felder).

In performing these works, as well as the works of the festival's young composers, the Arditti continue their longstanding tradition of assisting artists in realizing their ideas, a collaborative practice which has and which will continue to make them an integral ensemble in the contemporary field.

Magnus Andersson: Precision and Clarity

Magnus Andersson performs at JiB 2011

Among the special guests at June in Buffalo this year is Swedish performer Magnus Andersson.  Andersson is one of the most renowned guitarists in the contemporary music field, and has played an important role in the creation of the instrument's modern repertoire.

Andersson studied at London's Trinity College of Music and later at the Viotti Music Academy in Vercelli, Italy.  He was awarded the Composers Union Interpreter Prize in 1983, received the Swedish Gramophone Prize in 1985 and 1986, and was nominated for a Swedish Grammy in 1992.  In 1984 he was awarded the Kranischsteiner Prize at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt.  That same year he founded Darmstadt's guitar class, which he taught until 1996.  He currently teaches at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and was artistic director of the Stockholm New Music Festival in 2006 and 2008.  Andersson is a founding member of the chamber music group Ensemble SON, and has toured widely in a trio with cellist Rohan de Saram and bassoonist Pascal Gallois.  He has performed the premieres of numerous important contemporary works including Ferneyhough's Kurze Schatten II (1989), Franco Donatoni's Ase (Algo II), James Dillon's Shrouded Mirrors (1987), Sven-David Sandström's Away From (1982), and Mark Applebaum's DNA, as well as guitar concertos by Pisati, Sandström, and Donatoni.

Among the works Andersson will perform at June in Buffalo are Stefano Scodanibbio's Dos Abismos, another work composed especially for him, and one marked by a number of difficult techniques (one-handed harmonics, contrapuntal hammer-ons, etc.).  Andersson will also perform two works by Josh Levine:  Former Selves (2007) and Glimpses (1986).  Levine, a guitar player himself, describes his approach to the instrument in the former piece:  

The second movement, "Bridges in the middle of the ocean," begins with the solo guitar playing quick, ephemeral gestures and fragments of indistinct melodies as it journeys through a mostly silent space.  Mere vestiges of the instrument’s typical sonority characterize its strange, veiled sound world:  high residual pitches produced when the string strikes the fret, each accompanied by the woody thud of the  finger hitting the fretboard.

Finally, Andersson will join Dal Niente for a performance of Hans Abrahamsen's Winternacht, an earlier piece in that composer's oeuvre which Poul Ruders has described as "very precise and dreamingly poetic [...] almost classical in terms of clarity and discipline in orchestration and form."  Such a description seems an apt representation of Andersson's own approach to his instrument, which is always marked by a firm technical precision that does not eschew the 'dreamy' or impressionistic.  Indeed, this is why composers as varied as Ferneyhough, Scodanibbio, and Applebaum are continually drawn to write for him, and what makes him well-equipped to perform the music of Levine and Abrahamsen.  We'll look forward to his performances this week!

Hans Abrahamsen: Untouched Music

Hans Abrahamsen

This year, June in Buffalo is excited to welcome to the festival for the first time Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen.  A skilled orchestrator as renowned for his arrangements as his compositions, Abrahamsen has been celebrated for his monodrama, let me tell you (2013)—which received the 2016 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition—and his canonic Schnee (2006-08), for two pianos, percussion, and contrasting trios, which has been frequently identified as one of the landmark pieces of the early century.  Paul Griffiths has described the composer's music as "Resonant with the western tradition in all its facets, with ancient folk melody, with nature, with the vibrant structure of sound itself, [it] yet has the freshness of something untouched—untouched, and touching by being so."

Abrahamsen's music has a gained a reputation for its literal and figurative evocations of winterscapes, and even Griffiths' reference to the "untouched" quality of his work alludes to the condition of freshly fallen snow.  This is perhaps most apparent in Schnee, but is also present in his earlier work Winternacht (1976-78), as well as in the "glacial world of high harmonics" elicited by his Fourth String Quartet, the glistening austerity of let me tell you, and the solitary winterreise of Left, alone (2014-15), a concerto for piano left hand.  It would be understandable for a composer to feel some anxiety about being branded 'the winter composer', but Abrahamsen maintains the confidence of an artist who has created an aesthetic realm of their own, and who is content to reside there comfortably:  the composer is currently composing an opera based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen.

The composer was perhaps not always so comfortable, famously taking a break from composition that lasted nearly a decade in the early 1990s.  Before that, the Ligeti student's early works were associated with a Danish trend called the "New Simplicity," which reacted against the complexity of the Darmstadt school by seeking a music that increased objectivity by, in Erik Jakobsen's words, "[aiming] to liberate musical material from the composer’s personal attitudes and feelings."  [NB:  This is distinct from the later, more subjective German style of the same name, of which Wolfgang Rihm is the most recognizable adherent.]  Abrahamsen's orchestral piece Skum (1970) most clearly demonstrates this early approach.  By the mid-1970s, however, he had developed a more distinct style, as evident in the orchestral nocturne Nacht und Trompeten (1981), the frigid underbrush of Winternacht, and perhaps most famously, in the seven piano studies of 1984 (later expanded to ten studies).  In the following decade, the composer's compositional activity ceased, though he continued arranging, producing adaptations of works by Bach and Nielsen.  One must admit a certain level of artist boldness to not only know when to stop composing, but more significantly, when to start again.  It was after this break that Abrahamsen's music began to bear the "untouched" quality spoken of earlier, as if the composer found a way to reset, and to make a new music unhindered by his previous explorations.

His later style is marked by a pronounced intimacy, even in the larger ensemble works like Schnee.  This is perhaps most evident in a piece like Wald (2009), in which the micropolyphony of his former teacher is matched with modal folk-music melodies in a variation form that is at turns rhythmically erratic and ominously understated (see below).  The Four Pieces for Orchestra (2004), arrangements of his earlier piano studies, emphasize his unique orchestrational perspective, employing a large ensemble that includes a full percussion battery and Wagner tubas.

Audiences at June in Buffalo will hear Signal Ensemble perform Schnee on the evening of Friday June 10th (for more on that performance, see our Signal profile).  In addition, the Arditti Quartet will present the composer's Fourth Quartet (2012).  "[It] has become in its way a serene and cool piece," Abrahamsen says of the piece, which the composer began before his hiatus.  "So the Quartet has been finished luckily after twenty years—it was already in 1990 that I was commissioned by Wittener Tage für Neue Musik to write the piece for Arditti Quartet."  Dal Niente will perform the aforementioned Winternacht, a four-movement work whose title comes from a poem by Georg Trakl.  "The music has a strong impressionistic quality," says Poul Ruders, "four introverted still lives of the velvety, dark iceness of a silvery winter night (one can veritably sense the fairy tale-like sleigh ride in the two outer movements)."  Those outer movements are dedicated to Trakl, while the more classical form of the third movement bears a dedication to Stravinsky, and the eccentric density of the second is an hommage to M.C. Escher.  Finally, the earliest work of Abrahamsen's presented at the festival will be 1975's Stratifications, performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.  "The stratifications referred to in the title unfold on two different levels," the composer explains.  "There is the stratification of the time dimension produced by the opposition of contrasting parts; at the same time the polyphony, the presence of several simultaneously sounding layers, is of great importance to the music."  Several elements of the early New Simplicity style are superimposed into a more complex amalgam. "It is like seeing lantern slides.  But this 'fictive form crackles and the music gets attentive and real.  [It] is in a nightmare condition, where it is not getting anywhere in spite of a great dynamic display.  But finally is liberating itself and rising 'in triumph'."

Ensemble SIGNAL: Popups and Canons

UB's spring semester opened with Ensemble SIGNAL's residency at the University's new Creative Arts Initiative—a residency that included a masterclass, an open rehearsal, a discussion on artistic entrepreneurship, and Performance in the Dark, a concert of works by Steve Reich and Georg Friedrich Haas (read more about it here).  That was just the first of two non-consecutive weeks of SIGNAL's residency, and the second week took place earlier this month, bookending the semester with exciting events featuring the NY-based ensemble.

SIGNAL's Bill Solomon performs a
solo kalimba micro-concert

The second week began on May 2, with "popup concerts" at various locations around UB's North Campus.  Consisting of 15 'micro-concerts' in a span of 30 minutes, each popup concert featured one or two of the ensemble's musicians playing brief (3-15 minutes) unannounced lunchtime concerts around the campus.  The following day featured a workshop performance of the minimalist classic In C by Terry Riley.    For this event, the ensemble invited anyone able to read music and play an instrument to sit in with them through a reading of Riley's work, introducing UB students and community members not only to the famous piece's challenging form, but also to the excitement of playing alongside some of the most skilled new music performers.  The residency concluded with a celebratory concert of works by Steve Reich.  SIGNAL have long been renowned for their interpretations of Reich's music, especially their Harmonia Mundi recording of Music for 18 Musicians (which received a Diapason d’or in June 2015 and appeared on the Billboard Classical Crossover charts in May 2015).  This concert featured several of the composer's "hits" (1972's Clapping Music, and 1985's New York Counterpoint), as well as two recent works:  Radio Rewrite (2012), based on themes from two Radiohead songs, and Quartet (2013) for two vibraphones and two pianos.

But SIGNAL is not finished yet!  The ensemble will be back next month as one of the six resident ensembles at June in Buffalo.  At this year's festival, they will perform a concert of works by JiB participants (June 7, 4:00pm, Baird Recital Hall), taking their experience collaborating with renowned composers to JiB's young artists, helping them articulate their musical visions and offering authentic interpretations of their works.  SIGNAL will also perform an evening concert (June 10, 7:30pm, Lippes Concert Hall), which will consist of a single large-scale work:  Schnee by Hans Abrahamsen.  The Danish composer—who will be on the composition faculty at this year's festival—composed Schnee ("Snow") in 2008, and the work has since been called a "hidden gem" by the New York Times.  The piece has its roots in 8 Canons, a collection of Bach arrangements which used repetition and slow durations to open up a new way of looking at time in these often taken-for-granted works:

I became totally absorbed into this music and arranged them with the intention of the music being repeated many, many times, as a kind of minimal music.  Obviously, I didn't know which durations Bach had in mind, but by listening to his canons in this way, a profound new moving world of circular time was opened to me.  Depending on the perspective on these canons, the music and its time can stand still or move either backwards or forwards.

One of these arranged canons, Kanon zu acht Stimmen, BWV 1072, can be heard below in Abrahamsen's arrangement.

Schnee emerged through a similar idea, and, using the Bach arrangements as a model, Abrahamsen composed a pair of two large-scale canons for nine instruments divided into two halves (piano and 3 strings, piano and 3 winds, with percussion in the middle).

In my own work, an ongoing idea has persisted, of at some point writing a work consisting of a number of canonical movements that would explore this universe of time.  […]  In Schnee, a few simple and fundamental musical questions are explored.  […]  Can a phrase be answering?  Or questioning?  [Schnee's] two canons are identical like a painting in two versions, but with different colors.  And where the first one does not include the space, the second one does, as well as containing more canonical traces.

The piece soon expanded into ten canons which gracefully unfold over the course of an hour.  The airy, ghostly music begins with whispering, feather-soft gestures, and reduces itself from there as the piece develops.  The performers are told to detune their instruments between movements, moving lower and lower as the piece progresses, creating stranger and more otherworldly sounds.  The work's frigid title makes reference to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen", and many of the sparse melodies have a frosty lightness to them, sounding almost like snow falling gracefully downward.

Brad Lubman

SIGNAL is directed by Brad Lubman, who is a special guest at this year's festival.  Lubman has played an important role in contemporary music for the past twenty years, acting not only as the founding co-Artistic and Music Director of SIGNAL, but also as a frequent guest conductor of many of the world's leading ensembles (including Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Klangforum Wien, ASKO Ensemble, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, WDR Symphony Cologne, Finnish Radio Symphony, and the Center's own Slee Sinfonietta). Currently on faculty at the Eastman School of Music, Lubman is known for his versatile conducting technique and skilled realizations of contemporary and classical works alike.

We're excited that Brad Lubman and SIGNAL will be returning to this year's festival (for more on the long, productive relationship between the ensemble and June in Buffalo, see last year's profile).  Whether realizing classical minimalist works with UB students, premiering new works by emerging composers, or articulating the delicate subtleties of wintery canons, SIGNAL is always a reliable source for strong, proficient performances.