Berlin festival in New York: H.K. Gruber, Lindberg, Adès, and Kurtág
(December 2007)Berlin in Lights, which The New Yorker has called “a gloriously omnivorous music-and-arts festival that recently unfolded in and around Carnegie Hall,” featured the work of Boosey & Hawkes composers HK Gruber, Magnus Lindberg, Thomas Adès [Faber, Ltd], and György Kurtág [Editio Musica Budapest]. The New York Times called the composer/performer/chansonnier HK Gruber “a riveting interpreter” who, according to the Wall Street Journal, “link[ed] his numbers together with a lively commentary that mingled vivid history with personal anecdotes.”
The Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle opened all three of their Mahler programs with contemporary works which, The New Yorker affirmed, “held their own against Mahler’s monumental valedictions.” The first night brought the American premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Seht die Sonne (“Behold the Sun”).
The New York Times described: “Scored for almost exactly the same orchestra as Mahler’s Ninth, [Seht die Sonne] opens amid elusive and hushed instrumental atmospherics. Immediately a pointed four-note thematic statement is announced by the horns, though only rough variants on this motif seem to reappear as guideposts to the work, a 25-minute, shimmering, fitful score that builds in waves of sound. …
“At one point a gaggle of flutes break out, as if playing a frenzied game of tag, and the piece flows into a more rambunctious middle section, with punchy timpani riffs and an extroverted theme of wonderfully messy string chords. A funereal timpani roll signals the quizzical and ethereal conclusion.”
The New Yorker called Lindberg “a master painter of sound” and added, “One brief passage for strings, in espressivo E minor, feels like a door opening onto a new lyric realm.”
Thomas Adès’s Tevót, which received its American premiere on the Berlin Philharmonic’s second night, “announced itself as an instantly essential new work,” according to The New York Times, who also deemed Adès “audaciously inventive” and “the leading British composer of his generation.”
The New Yorker reported: “In Adès’s Tevót – the title is Hebrew for ‘arks,’ and also for musical bars or measures – lyrical release is not a momentary digression but the final goal. Adès, the former enfant terrible of British music, has matured wonderfully as a composer…” and continued, “This is majestic orchestral oratory, but it’s something other than a scene of triumph; instead lamentation has changed into a desperate prayer. …Mr. Adès has written a musical conveyance for feelings of struggle, mortality, and loss.”
New York Magazine concluded: “Adès is one of the few contemporary composers who cannot be diminished by post-intermission Mahler.”
Also on this list of powerful contemporary composers is György Kurtág, whose Stele opened the final Berlin Philharmonic program with Simon Rattle. The Boston Globe explained: “Kurtág wrote the piece in 1994 for the Berlin Philharmonic and its then-conductor Claudio Abbado. The massed orchestral forces make it atypical for Kurtág, but it is familiar in its brevity – three connected movements totaling just 12 minutes – and its fantastic power of gesture.” The New York Times asserted: “The quality of ‘Stele … is clear from the start…here the fineness of the textures and the originality of the colors advertise the poise of a master.” The New Yorker echoed these thoughts, declaring Stele to be “a modern classic.”
For information on programming any of these works, please contact composers.us@boosey.com
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