17 MAI 2018 - 20h30 - Schloss Leuk

SEGANTINI QUARTETT (Bern) & HELENA BUGALLO

 

 

SEGANTINI QUARTETT & HELENA BUGALLO

http://www.segantiniquartett.com
http://www.bugallowilliams.com

Antonio Pellegrini, Violine
Marianne Aeschbacher, Violine
Fabio Marano, Bratsche
Tobias Moster, Violoncello
Helena Bugallo, Klavier

 

PROGRAMM

Morton Feldman
Piano and String Quartet (1985)

 

MORTON FELDMAN (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer, born in New York City. A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to explore extremes of duration. Feldman was born in Brooklyn, New York City into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Kiev. His father was a manufacturer of children's coats. As a child he studied piano with Vera Maurina Press, who, according to the composer himself, instilled in him a "vibrant musicality rather than musicianship." Feldman's first composition teachers were Wallingford Riegger, one of the first American followers of Arnold Schoenberg, and Stefan Wolpe, a German-born Jewish composer who studied under Franz Schreker and Anton Webern. Feldman and Wolpe spent most of their time simply talking about music and art. In early 1950 Feldman went to hear the New York Philharmonic give a performance of Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21. After this work, the orchestra was going to perform a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Feldman left immediately before that, disturbed by the audience's disrespectful reaction to Webern's work. In the lobby he met John Cage, who was at the concert and had also decided to step out. The two composers quickly became good friends, with Feldman moving into the apartment on the second floor of the building Cage lived in. Through Cage, he met sculptor Richard Lippold (who had a studio next door) and artists Sonia Sekula, Robert Rauschenberg, and others, and composers such as Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil. With encouragement from Cage, Feldman began to write pieces that had no relation to compositional systems of the past, such as the constraints of traditional harmony or the serial technique. He experimented with non-standard systems of musical notation, often using grids in his scores, and specifying how many notes should be played at a certain time, but not which ones. Feldman's experiments with the use of chance in his composition in turn inspired John Cage to write pieces like the Music of Changes, where the notes to be played are determined by consulting the I Ching. Through Cage, Feldman met many other prominent figures in the New York arts scene, among them Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Frank O'Hara. He found inspiration in the paintings of the abstract expressionists, and throughout the 1970s wrote a number of pieces around twenty minutes in length, including Rothko Chapel (1971, written for the building of the same name, which houses paintings by Mark Rothko) and For Frank O'Hara (1973). In 1977, he wrote the opera Neither with original text by Samuel Beckett. Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for Jack Garfein's 1961 film, Something Wild. However, after hearing the music for the opening scene, in which a character (played by Carroll Baker, incidentally also Garfein's wife) is raped, the director promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the startled director was said to be, "My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?" Morton Feldman's music "changed radically" in 1970: moving away from his interest in graphic notation and arhythmic notation systems and toward a more rhythmically precise method of composition. The first piece of this new period was a short, fifty-five measure work entitled "Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety", dedicated to his childhood piano teacher, Vera Maurina Press. In 1973, at the age of 47, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor (a title of his own devising) at the University at Buffalo. Prior to that time, Feldman had earned his living as a full-time employee at the family textile business in New York's garment district. In addition to teaching at SUNY Buffalo, Feldman also held residences during the mid-1980s at the University of California, San Diego. Later, he began to produce his very long works, often in one continuous movement, rarely shorter than half an hour in length and often much longer. These works include Violin and String Quartet (1985, around 2 hours), For Philip Guston (1984, around four hours) and, most extreme, the String Quartet II (1983, which is over six hours long without a break.) Typically, these pieces maintain a very slow developmental pace (if not static) and tend to be made up of mostly very quiet sounds. Feldman said himself that quiet sounds had begun to be the only ones that interested him. In a 1982 lecture, Feldman noted: "Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?" Feldman married the Canadian composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death. He died from pancreatic cancer in 1987 at his home in Buffalo, New York, after fighting for his life for three months.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Feldman

A major figure in 20th-century music, Morton Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman’s works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to explore extremes of duration. If any single piece epitomizes the beauty and the hypnotic power of Morton Feldman’s final works, it is Piano and String Quartet, composed in 1985, just two years before his death. Performances generally last between 80 and 90 minutes, relatively modest by the standards of late Feldman, but the self-contained world this music creates is utterly distinctive, and the way of listening to it unique – “Up to an hour you think about form”, Feldman once wrote, “but after an hour and a half it’s scale”. The tempo never changes, the dynamic range is limited and the musical material scanty: rocking chords that never quite repeat exactly, long held single notes and an upward arpeggio that acts like a point of reference throughout. The composer David Lang points up the relationship between Feldman’s music and that of Webern: in Piano and String Quartet, Lang says, “you can hear Webern in the distance – in the way each gesture, each note, each phrase matters. It’s just that in Feldman’s music there are so many, many more of them."

Source: https://fdleone.com/2016/05/02/morton-feldmans-piano-and-string-quartet/

 

Antonio Pellegrini erhielt seine wichtigste Musikausbildung in Mailand
beim Primarius des Quartetto Italiano, Paolo Borciani. Nach dem Diplom
am Conservatorio Guiseppe Verdi studierte er bei Corrado Romano in
Genf, wo er mit einem 1. Preis und Auszeichnung das Solistendiplom
abschloss. Wichtige Etappen auf seinem Weg waren die Mitwirkung in
verschiedenen Ensembles, u. a. beim Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt und
dem Ensemble 13, Karlsruhe. Vor der Gründung des Pelegrini-Quartett
im Jahr 1989 hatte er zahlreiche kammermusikalische und solistische
Erfahrungen gesammelt, hauptsächlich mit seinem Klavierpartner
Michael Uhde. Es liegen zahlreiche CD- Einspielungen mit dem
Pellegrini-Quartett vor. 2014 Gründung des Segantiniquartett
zusammen mit Marianne Aeschbacher, Fabio Marano und Tobias Moster.

 

Marianne Aeschbacher, geboren und aufgewachsen in Bern,
Violinstudium in Bern, Basel und Wien. Entscheidende Impulse von ihren
Lehrern Hansheinz Schneeberger und György Kurtag ( Kammermusik),
Konzertmeisterin des Ensemble Phönix Basel für zeitgenössische Musik
bis 2011. Von 1988 bis 2004 Konzertmeisterin der Basel Sinfonietta und
seit 2003-2015 Mitglied des Kammerorchester Basel. Während 15
Jahren Konzertmeisterin des Kammerensembles " La Strimpellata Bern".
An der Musikschule der MAB unterrichtet sie seit 1996 Kinder und
Jugentliche unter anderem auch in der Talentförderung und der
Berufsvorbereitungsklasse. An der Musikhochschule Basel unterrichtet
sie Studenten im Nebenfach Geige.

 

Der Bratschist Fabio Marano wurde in Rom geboren und erhielt seine
musikalische Ausbildung am Conservatorio S. Cecilia in Rom. Von 1993
bis 1997 studierte er bei Prof. Rainer Schmidt an der Musikhochschule
Würzburg und schloss dort mit dem Meisterklassendiplom ab. Von 1995
bis 1998 bei den Nürnberger Symphonikern. Mitglied des Pellegrini-
Quartetts war er von 1999 bis 2014. Zusammenarbeit mit dem
Ensemble Modern Frankfurt, Musikfabrik Köln, dem SWR
Sinfonieorchester Baden Baden und Freiburg, dem Hessischen
Rundfund und dem Collegium Novum Zürich.
Von 1997 bis 2006 war er Lehrbeauftragter an der Musikhochschule
Würzburg im Fach Viola (Hauptfach) und seit 2003 unterrichtet er eine
Klasse an der Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe.

 

Tobias Moster, 1959 in Mainz geboren. Studien in Frankfurt, Basel und
Lyon bei Reine Flachot, Radu Aldulescu und Thomas Demenga.Vor
allem als Solist und Kammermusiker tätig. Weites Repertoire als
Barockcellist bis hin zu intensiver Beschäftigung mit zeitgenössischer
Musik. Mitglied des Ensembles Aequatuor Zürich sowie der PréArt
Soloist Zürich. Langjähriges Mitglied des Tetra Streichquartett und
2013/2014 des Pellegriniquartetts. Zahlreiche Radio- und CD
Aufnahmen, z.B. von Werken der Schweizer Komponisten Alfred
Zimmerlin, Mischa Käser, Matthias Arter oder Jürg Wyttenbach. Er ist
Lehrer an der Musikschule Konservatorium Zürich sowie an der ZHdK
Zürich. Lebt mit seiner Familie in Basel.

 

Geboren und aufgewachsen in Argentinien, die Pianistin Helena
Bugallo
ist auf internationalen Festivals in Europa, Lateinamerika und
der USA aufgetreten (u.a. Donaueschinger Musiktage, Warschauer
Herbst, Musica Viva München, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik,
Musik Triennale Köln, Venedig Biennale, Festival del Centro Histórico
Mexiko, Teatro San Martín Buenos Aires, Tanglewood, Ojai Festival,
Miller Theater New York und Cal Arts Berkeley). Sie ist Mitglied des
Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo (www.bugallowilliams.com) sowie des
Ensemble Phoenix Basel (www.ensemble-phoenix.ch). Als Solistin hat sie
unter die Leitung von Reinbert de Leeuw, Peter Eötvös, Stefan Asbury,
Peter Rundel und Marcus Creed gespielt, zusammen mit dem
Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Warsaw Philharmonic
Orchestra, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart und Ensemble Resonanz von
Hamburg. Sie hat mit zahlreichen Komponisten/Innen zusammen
gearbeitet und für die Labels Wergo, Albany Records, Neos, Musique
Suisses und Coviello CDs aufgenommen. Sie besitzt
Hochschulabschlüsse in Musik vom Conservatorio Provincial von La Plata
(Argentinien) und der State University of New York in Buffalo (USA), wo
sie einen Magister in Klavier erwarb und in Musikwissenschaft
promovierte. Ihre Doktorarbeit schrieb sie über die Musik von Conlon
Nancarrow. Seit 2003 lebt sie in Basel.

 

 

 

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