CONCERT II: This is Beethoven – Farrin, Wang, & Kagel
PROGRAM:
WANG LU Like Clockwork (2020) – World Premiere
SUZANNE FARRIN uscirmi di braccia (leave my arms) for viola and percussion (2010)
MAURICIO KAGEL Ludwig Van (1970)
PERFORMERS:
Eric Rynes violin
Jordan Voelker viola
Rose Bellini cello
Bonnie Whiting percussion
Cristina Valdés piano
Marcin Pączkowski electronics
Our second concert will be a part of the city-wide THIS IS BEETHOVEN Festival, curated by Emerald City Music, in celebrating the 250th birthday of this iconic classical composer. Seattle Modern Orchestra will present music as revolutionary, critical, and responsive in our time–as Beethoven was in his time. The program includes Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1970), a tribute to Beethoven on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth. The indeterminate “meta-collage” of Beethoven’s music challenges the performers not only in their technical virtuosity but also their ability to recreate music as composers themselves. The concert will also feature a new work by Chinese composer and pianist, Wang Lu, titled Like Clockwork. Wang, Professor of Music at Brown University, has received many awards including Berlin Prize in Music Composition, 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation and the Fromm Foundation. This new work reflects on our current experience with time during the pandemic and the music of Beethoven. The concert will open with American composer Suzanne Farrin who disrupts the romantic idealization of Petrach’s sonnet on Apollo and Daphne in her work for viola and percussion, uscirmi di braccia (leave my arms).
TICKET AND INFORMATION:
This is Beethoven will be livestreamed on this festival website from December 16-19, 2020. The partner organizations have committed to hosting this festival at no-cost to viewers because we believe in the power that the arts have to unite, inspire, and bring people together through innovation and collaboration. To support this critical work into the future, we ask listeners to step up and support partner organizations with a festival donation during the livestreams. After festival livestreams, a selection of festival offerings will remain available to stream on-demand after the livestream, accessible to donors through January 4, 2021. All gifts are tax-deductible.
THIS IS BEETHOVEN – Click here for more information
Technical coordination provided by DXARTS.
ABOUT OUR FEATURED COMPOSER:
Wang Lu, Composer/Pianist
Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from traditional Chinese music, urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.
She is currently the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Wang Lu’s works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Alarm Will Sound, Minnesota Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Holland Symfonia, Shanghai National Chinese Orchestra, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Musiques Nouvelles, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Sound, Yarn/Wire, Curious Chamber Players, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Argento, the Aizuri Quartet, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Momenta Quartet and violinists Miranda Cuckson, Jennifer Koh, and pianist Joel Fan among others.
Wang Lu has received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (Spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and she has received commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard. She won first prize at Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne’s Young Composers Forum in 2010 and shared the Tactus International Young Composers Orchestra Forum Award in 2008. She was selected for a Tremplin commission by IRCAM/Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2010 and the International Composition Seminar with the Ensemble Modern in 2012, and has also received two ASCAP Morton Gould awards.
Her music was programmed on festivals such as the 2014 New York Philharmonic Biennial, MATA Festival, Cresc. Biennale in Frankfurt, Gaudeamus Music Week, Tanglewood, Cabrillo Music Festival, Beijing Modern, Pacific and Takefu festivals in Japan, Mostly Mozart, Aspekte Festival in Salzburg, Mizzou International Composers Festival, and the Havana New Music Festival. She has also been a resident at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Collaborations have included an installation at Brown University’s Cohen Gallery with artist Polly Apfelbaum and an evening of poetry and music with poet Ocean Vuong. In 2019, her music was featured on portrait concerts at Miller Theater with ICE and Yarn/Wire, with Ensemble Recherche in Paris, and with Ensemble Mosaik plus soloists Ryan Muncy and Wu Wei in Berlin. Wang Lu’s recent compositions include a brass fanfare Code Switch for the opening of the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW 2019-20 season, a duet for Noh performer Ryoko Aoki and cello, a flute and electronic piece for Claire Chase’s Density 2036, a solo piano work for Shai Wosner in honor of I.M. Pei, a new work for the Longleash trio supported by New Music USA, and a new work for the Talea Ensemble commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University.
Wang Lu is the next Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer at the Chicago Opera Theatre starting in the Fall 2020. Her residency will conclude in 2022 with a full-length opera produced by the Chicago Opera Theatre.
Of her portrait album Urban Inventory, released in March 2018, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker, “I’ve listened at least a dozen times to the composer Wang Lu’s new album, Urban Inventory (New Focus Recordings), and remain happily lost in its riotous maze of ideas and images. Every moment is vividly etched, drenched in instrumental color, steeped in influences that range from ancient Chinese folk music to the latest detonations of the European avant-garde… The sense of loneliness that emerges at the end of “Cloud Intimacy” lurks behind all of Wang Lu’s meticulous frenzies: it is of a piece with the essential solitude of composing, of sitting in silence and dreaming of a music that has never been heard.”