The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble and the international chamber orchestra Ostravská banda - both founded and directed by Petr Kotik - join forces for an evening of rarely performed classics and world premieres by emerging composers at Zankel Hall on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 (7:30 p.m.). Highlights include acclaimed Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle in György Ligeti's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; award-winning Czech violinist Hana Kotková in the N.Y. premiere of Luca Francesconi's Riti neurali; and long-time John Cage's collaborator Joseph Kubera in Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The program also features world premieres by two young and up-and-coming composers - Carolyn Chen's Wilder Shores of Love and Alex Mincek's Pendulum #7-and Kotik's own In Four Parts, 3, 6 & 11 (for John Cage). Kotik will conduct The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble as well as Ostravská banda.
The celebrated concert in 1992,"Tribute to John Cage" at Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, established The Orchestra of the S.E.M Ensemble. For this occasion, SEM Orchestra premiered Cage's complete Atlas Eclipticalis with David Tudor on piano. For its return to the prestigious concert venue, The Orchestra of S.E.M. will partner with Ostravská banda - a unique chamber orchestra, composed of some of the best young musicians from Europe and the United States. Ostravská banda was founded in 2005 as the orchestra-in-residence of the acclaimed Ostrava Days festival, founded by Petr Kotik in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
The Program:
• Renowned for its rhythmical complexity, György Ligeti's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1985-88) draws its inspiration from the technical procedures and structures of African music, in which Ligeti was intensely interested at the time. The composition makes uses of "illusory rhythms" (or polyrhythms similar to African drumming). Individual voices are combined to give the impression that the music is speeding up or slowing down, creating the illusion of endlessly ascending or descending - a parallel to fractal geometry.
* Petr Kotik and
Joseph Kubera - who have each collaborated and performed with
John Cage until his death in 1992 - are perhaps the most authentic performers of his music. Kotik's history with Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-1958) began in1964, when he performed the work with Cage and Tudor. Kubera is the only pianist alive today who performed with Cage as a member of the Cunningham Dance Company for many years. Cage's Concert has an open instrumentation, and the Zankel Hall performance marks a rare occasion the complete work is presented with full orchestra.
* Displaying tremendous virtuosity in both the soloist and the ensemble parts, Riti neurali is perhaps Luca Francesconi's most successful larger-scale composition to date. Its title is a pun on neural "rites," or impulses, and its instrumentation is identical to that of Schubert's Octet in F major. Beginning with short violin gestures, the work builds until the entire group is taken into a collective frenzy. At the end of the piece, Francesconi includes a "personal signature"- a singing melody alluding to Schubert - as a release to the use of European post-serial language.
Carolyn Chen (b. 1983) and Alex Mincek (b. 1975) represent a new generation of composers that create independent and innovative music, not defined by known stylistic techniques. Former participants in Ostrava Days Institute and Festival, they are each presenting works that have been composed especially for the Zankel Hall concert.
* Carolyn Chen's Wilder Shores of Love (2011) is inspired by the sweeping motions of both Cy Twombly's paintings and the Pacific Ocean. Material is moved from one player to the other in a similar motion, yet not exactly the same. "As in a school of fish," the composer suggests, "parts weave through one another, sometimes drifting apart, sometimes coalescing."
• Alex Mincek's Pendulum #7 (2011) scored for saxophone and ensemble and featuring the composer as soloist, is part of an ongoing series of pieces inspired by multiple physical, temporal, and spatial phenomena demonstrated by the swinging motions of the pendulum. The work uses material characterized by back and forth "movements" between various binary relationships - some obvious and direct, such as fast vs. slow, or high vs. low, others more subtle such as pure difference vs. bare repetition, or physical gesture vs. audible structure.
• Petr Kotik was inspired to write In Four Parts 3, 6 & 11 (for
John Cage) by two events: the performance of the TimeTable percussion ensemble at Le Poisson Rouge in 2009, and the Cunningham Memorial performance at the Park Avenue Armory in which Kotik heard a recording of Cage's Cheap Imitation, performed by the composer (hence the dedication to
John Cage). The work premiered at Paula Cooper Gallery in December 2009 by TimeTable and in October/November 2010 on a European tour by Ostravská banda.
In addition to the Zankel Hall concert, Ostravská banda will celebrate the release of their double CD, Ostravská banda on Tour (Mutable Music Rcords) on Friday, April 15 at 7 p.m. at the Bohemian National Hall (Czech Center, 321 E. 73ed Street, NYC). The event will include a brief presentation of the 2011 Ostrava Days - the biennial new music summer institute where the ensemble was created - followed by works by former and upcoming Ostrava Days residents. The CD's highlights include Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Somei Satoh's The Passion and Kotik's In Four Parts, among others. For more information, visit http://www.semensemble.org/ or
http://www.newmusicostrava.cz/en/ostravska-banda/about-orchestra
