Kurt Schwertsik at 90: birthday concert in Vienna
The Musikverein in Vienna hosts celebrations for Kurt Schwertsik’s 90th birthday year with a concert by Kontrapunkte on 23 November. His popular tribute to Erik Satie for strings and bandoneon, Adieu Satie, receives multiple performances this season.
Austrian composer Kurt Schwertsik reached his 90th birthday in June and Vienna honours him with a special celebratory concert at the Musikverein on 23 November at 5.30 pm, part of the Wien Modern festival. The all-Schwertsik programme is performed by Kontrapunkte conducted by Gottfried Rabl, combining works for chamber ensemble and a collection of songs, giving a view into the composer’s distinct compositional world.
Repertoire for the birthday concert includes two classic Schwertsik ensemble works from the 1970s and 1980s. Twilight Music is a divertimento described as a ‘Celtic serenade for octet’, consisting of clarinet, bassoon, horn and string quintet, which matches the Schubert Octet. Blechpartie, a witty brass quintet ‘in the latest style’, romps through the comic conventions of the Viennese Kasperltheater. The Longest 10 Minutes, a sonatina for 14 instruments, dates from 2006 and continues a compositional tradition stretching forwards from Muzio Clementi while displaying subtly subversive Schwertsik fingerprints.
Two song cycles, displaying Schwertsik’s love of poetry and wordplay, are performed by vocalists Georg Nigl and Josipa Bainac. The seven songs of Die Wahrheit ist, man hat mir nichts getan for baritone and ensemble set texts by Jewish émigré writer Theodor Kramer (1897-1958) and were composed in 2009. The four songs of Ein taubenspäter Nachmittag for mezzo and ensemble with poetry by writer and historian Julian Schutting, an Austrian contemporary of Schwertsik, were premiered in 2017 and bear the curious title of ‘a pigeon-late afternoon’.
> Visit the Wien Modern website
Adieu Satie, Schwertsik’s tribute to composer Erik Satie, has proved to be one of his most popular works across recent decades. Scored for bandoneon and strings, the piece is available in versions with either string quartet or string ensemble including double bass. Recent performances by the Ensemble Wiener Collage and the œsterreichisches ensemble fuer neue music are followed by performances with bandoneonist Milos Todorovski and a quartet drawn from the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra on 13 October at the Arnold Schönberg Center and by the Ambitus Ensemble at the OFF Theater on 18 November. Adieu Satie is featured in a further Viennese concert in the spring given by bandoneonist Karin Küstner and the oenm at the Alte Schmiede Kunstverein on 20 March.
Highlights across Schwertsik’s 90th birthday year have included the German premiere of Fioretti per San Francesco with the MDR Symphony Orchestra and Radio Choir at the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Czech and Austrian premieres of Muertes en Relajo featuring the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, with both works conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, a longtime champion of Schwertsik’s music. The composer’s Violin Concerto No.1 is performed at the Berlin Philharmonie on 19 April with Benjamin Herzl as soloist and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester conducted by Nil Venditti.
> Further information on Work: Adieu Satie
Photo: Clemens Fabry