Closing Concert of the 2024 Beijing Modern Music Festival

2024.5.12（Sunday）  19:30

CCOM Opera & Concert Hall

Program

Beat Furrer        Retour an dich  for Piano Trio (1986)                13’

Xiaogang YE       Strophe  (2019)                                  12’

------------------------------------------ Intermission -----------------------------------------------

Georges Aperghis  Situations, une convivialité musicale for 24 musicians (2013）      66’

 Introduction

KLANGFORUM WIEN

Open-minded, virtuosic in performance and aurally perceptive, Klangforum Wien – one of the internationally most renowned ensembles for contemporary music – devotes itself to the artistic interpretation and expansion of experiential space. A performance of Klangforum Wien is an event in the best sense of the word; it offers a sensual experience, immediate and inescapable; and the novelty in its music speaks, acts and beguiles. 

Ever since it was founded by Beat Furrer in 1985, the ensemble – which, over the years, has received a great number of awards and distinctions – has written music history: It has presented around 600 world premieres of works by composers from four continents; it boasts an extensive discography of more than 90 releases, and is part of the major music festivals in Europe, America and Asia: Salzburg Festival, Wiener Festwochen, Wien Modern, Holland Festival, Ruhrtriennale, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne Paris, and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Warsaw Autumn among others. Klangforum Wien frequently performs at the most important concert and opera venues such as the Wiener Konzerthaus, Musikverein Wien, Pierre Boulez Saal (Berlin), Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ (Amsterdam), Teatro alla Scala (Milan), Teatro Real (Madrid), Opéra national de Paris, Library of Congress (Washington DC), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), or Tongyeong Concert Hall. In a mutually rewarding collaboration with many of the world’s leading composers, the ensemble has formed a great number of formative artistic friendships, and it enjoys working with the most eminent conductors of our time – including Sylvain Cambreling, Péter Eötvös, Pablo Heras-Casado, Susanna Mälkki, Ingo Metzmacher, Kent Nagano, Matthias Pintscher, Emilio Pomàrico, Simone Young – as well as with leading stage directors like Luc Bondy, Frank Castorf, Claus Guth, Jan Lauwers, Christoph Marthaler, or Peter Sellars.

Since 2009, the musicians of Klangforum Wien have devoted themselves to sharing their comprehensive mastery of playing techniques and forms of expression with a new generation of artists in the context of their collective professorship at the University of Music, Graz.

Klangforum Wien is made up of 25 musicians from Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. From the start of the 2018/19 season until summer 2022, Bas Wiegers was Klangforum Wien’s Principal Guest Conductor, taking over from Sylvain Cambreling who, however, has maintained a close relationship with the ensemble as its Principal Guest Conductor Emeritus. Per 1 January 2024, Elena Schwarz and Vimbayi Kaziboni serve as the new Conductors in Residence. Peter Paul Kainrath has been the ensemble's director since 1 January 2020.

Klangforum Wien has its own annual concert series at the Wiener Konzerthaus. Every year, the ensemble commissions composers and gives numerous world and territorial premieres. The repertoire choice and the ensemble’s intense understanding of the pieces contribute to diversity, and are matched by the flawless execution of the music. Honorary members of Klangforum Wien are Georges Aperghis, Sylvain Cambreling, Friedrich Cerha, Barbara Fränzen, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Lothar Knessl, Bernhard Lang, Olga Neuwirth, Peter Oswald, Enno Poppe, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino.

The Members of KLANGFORUM WIEN

Wendy Vo Cong Tri

Flute

Vera Fischer

Flute

Markus Deuter

Oboe/heckelphone

Hugo Queiros

Clarinet

Bernhard Zachhuber 

Clarinet 

Lorelei Dowling 

Bassoon/Contrabassoon

Alvaro Collao Leon

Saxophone

Christoph Walder 

Horn

Anders Nyqvist  

Trumpet

Michael Büttler 

Trombone

Sophie Schafleitner  

Violin

Annette Bik 

Violin 

Gunde Jäch 

Violin

Paul Beckett 

Viola

Andreas Lindenbaum 

Violoncello

Benedikt Leitner 

Violoncello

Evan Hulbert 

Double Bass

Miriam Overlach 

Harp

Alex Lipowski 

Percussion

Laurent Warnier 

Percussion

Florian Müller 

Piano

Carter Muller 

Piano

Krassimir Sterev 

Accordion

Composers

According to the repertoire order

Beat Furrer 

Beat Furrer was born in Schaffhausen (Switzerland) in 1954. After moving to Vienna in 1975, he studied with Otmar Suitner and Roman Haubenstock Ramati. In 1985 he founded the Klangforum Wien, which he directed until 1992, and with which he is still associated as conductor. Commissioned by the Vienna State Opera, he composed his first opera Die Blinden. In 1996 he was composer-in-residence at the Lucerne Festival. In autumn 1991 Furrer became a full professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Graz. He has been guest professor in composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt 2006–2009. Together with violinist Ernst Kovacic he founded "impuls", a International Ensemble and Composers Academy for Contemporary Music. In 2004 he was awarded the Music Prize of the City of Vienna, and in 2005 became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2006 for his work FAMA. In 2010 his music theatre Wüstenbuch was premiered in Basel. In 2014 he was awarded with Great Austrian State Prize. In 2018 he received the Ernst-von-Siemens music prize in recognition of his lifetime's compositional outoput. Since the 1980s Beat Furrer has composed a wide range of works, from solo and ensemble music to orchestral and choral works and opera. He is well know for his nuanced exploration of the human voice and its relationship to instrumental sound.

Retour an dich  for Piano Trio

This is ascetic, introverted music. Instead of opening, unfolding, the fragments which constitute it convey to listeners a sense of the ideas and feelings they contain. If the music seems cold (except for some gentle, lyrically suggestive sections), that surely has to do with the image in the composer’s mind as he worked: “I speak of shards of glass, shining like pearls on the river bottom which again and again awaken our longing, where we step down ever again to retrieve them, only to find that they are merely shards of glass when we see them on the surface.”

Xiaogang YE

Xiaogang YE is the founding dean of School of Music, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, a professor of the Central Conservatory of Music, and a music educator. YE was a member of the National Committee of 10th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and a member of the Standing Committee of the 11th, 12th, and 13th CPPCC. He is currently vice chairman of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, chairman of the China Musicians Association, an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, international chair in composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, distinguished professor of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music  and the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in Guangzhou, honorary professor of the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music, and a consultant to the Tianjin Juilliard School. YE is the founder and artistic director of the Beijing Modern Music Festival, Shenzhen Belt & Road International Music Festival, Tsingtao International Music Festival, Guangdong-Hongkong-Macao Greater Bay Area Music Season, and International Music Competition Harbin. He is one of the members of Talents Project selected by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, and an expert who enjoys a special allowance from the State Council. YE is a representative figure of contemporary Chinese music and one of the most well-known composers in the country.

YE has composed a large number of works in a variety of genres, including symphonic music, chamber music, dance drama and opera, as well as film and TV music. YE’s important symphonic works include Ode to Heroes, Horizon, The Last Paradise, Song of the Earth, Twilight of the Himalayas, Scent of Green Mango, Mount E’mei, Lu Xun (Symphony No.5), The Heroes (Symphony No.7), The Backyard of the Village, Springs in the Forest, Yangzhuoyong Cuo, Shenzhen Story, Macau Bride Suites and Yong Le. The Jade Goddess of Mercy and The Rise of the Great Nations, two of his film scores, were very well received. YE’s piano concerto Starry Sky, written for Lang Lang, was viewed by an audience of around three billion people worldwide when it was performed as part of the opening ceremony concert of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Since 1995, the world-renowned publisher Schott has published and served as an agent for YE’s works.

YE’s works have been widely performed by orchestras in China and abroad, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Bamberger Symphoniker, Munchner Philharmoniker, Philhamoniker Hamburg, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestra Del Teatro Alla Scala, Russian National Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, New Japanese Philharmonic, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Macao Orchestra, China Philharmonic Orchestra, China National Symphony Orchestra, and Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. His works have been presented in the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Macau Arts Festival, Beijing Music Festival, Shanghai Spring International Music Festival, Shanghai New Music Week, Musikfestspiele Saar, Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, and George Enescu International Festival.

Beginning in 2013, the “China Story” concert series featuring YE’s music has been presented in venues all over the world, including Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center (New York), and concert halls in Berlin, Saarbrücken, Münich, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Moscow, Kolkata, San Jose (Costa Rica), Lima (Peru), Nates (France), Dublin, and Bydgoszcz (Poland). The events have constituted a significant contribution to the propagation of Chinese contemporary music on the international stage, receiving wide acclaim and gaining great success.

YE has been the recipient of many prestigious honors in China and abroad, including a Five Distinguished Project Award by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, a Wenhua Music Award by the China Ministry of Culture, a first prize of the Golden Bell Award by the China Musicians Association, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, and a 2013 China Arts Award, among others. YE has composed music for more than 30 important Chinese movies and TV series, and won “The Best Score Award” five times for his efforts in this area.

As a member of the Standing Committee of the 11th, 12th, and 13th CPPCC, YE has been enthusiastic in the promotion of music and of national arts education. He has made strong appeals to increase government funding for the arts and has proposed motions concerning cross-cultural exchanges and the protection of musical copyright. At many national meetings, YE has called relentlessly for increasing public attention to the protection of intellectual property, and for the promotion of cultural exchanges with the rest of the world. There has been dramatic progress in both of these areas as a result of his vigorous efforts.

Strophe

Strophe is a chamber music work which has been planned for more than 20 years. Composer Xiaogang Ye had always reserved an opus for it in his earlier work list but the work has been dragging on for many years for a manifold of reasons.

Several years ago, Mr. Joel Sachs told Ye that the New Juilliard Ensemble would like to perform one of his chamber works and thus Ye thought it would be the right time to finally complete the work. Unexpectedly, it was delayed for another several years. By 2019, the New Juilliard Ensemble confirmed with Ye the exact concert date for this music while he was busy composing several other pieces such as the commissioned works for the Tsingtao International Music Festival. Ye managed to finish the pieces one by one. When he finally started to work on Strophe, the environment had changed significantly because of the Covid-19 that swept through East Asia. The hard fighting and painful inability of countless lives to cope with the disaster deeply shocked everyone around the world.

The Strophe we hear today is one of the strangest pieces in Ye’s catalogue: Planned for nearly 2 decades, delayed indefinitely due to his busy schedule, and finally completely changing in intention at the last minute. In the other words, the music contains the composer's 20 years of life — What he sees, feels, and thinks, the evolution of musical expression, the impact of technology on its content, the composer's free and unrestrained spirit, the incurable pain inherent in human nature, the unknown vast universe, and the confusion of looking for the way out of the state in which dawn is hardly visible.

Georges Aperghis

Greek composer Georges Aperghis, born in Athens in 1945, has lived and worked in Paris since 1963. He takes part in the great adventure of musical theater that begun in France at the Festival d'Avignon.  He went on to create La histoire… (1971), and Histoire de loups (1976) for the festival.  

A prolific composer with never-ending inventiveness, Aperghis is building a very personal corpus of works, serious and humorous at the same time, rooted in tradition as well as free of institutional constraints. 

In October 2011, Aperghis received the Mauricio Kagel’s Prize, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and the Frontiers of Knowledge Prize from the BBVA Foundation in 2016. In 2018, he was one of the guest personalities of  Ircam's ManiFeste festival, for the creation of his piece Thinking Things and for the French premiere of Obstinate, for double bass solo. In 2021, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich awarded him the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis for his life's work. 

Situations, une convivialité musicale （2013）

The piece demands a wide stage where the usual orchestral configuration will be interspersed with a colorful mix of easy chairs, assemblies of sofas, floor lamps, bookcases, and dinner tables to create a landscaped interior in which the musicians, in the course of the evening, will team up variously into freely formed groups. Over sixty minutes, the composition will change from stretches of chamber music to passages for soloists and up to groups of eight, verbal comments by individual musicians and also the whole ensemble. 

Situations is a concert piece, a soirée musicale for the 24 musicians of Klangforum Wien. The work takes the form of a triptych. We no longer attend a concert, but participate in a soirée where the musicians seem to have forgotten that there is an audience that watches and listens. As you can see, the piece changes shape three times. In the second movement, there appears to be something like an enlargement effect, as if one was approaching the musicians in order to get as close as possible to their personality. 

Conductor

Titus Engel  Conductor

In 2020 Titus Engel was named Conductor of the Year by Opernwelt magazine. With his comprehensive view of repertoire from a wide range of musical eras, he consistently grasps works in their diverse interrelationships. Starting in the 2023/24 season, the Berlin-based Zurich native took over as Principal Conductor of the Basel Sinfonietta. He recently thrilled audiences with Tobias Kratzer's new production of Henze's The Raft of the Medusa at the Komische Oper Berlin as well as with the revival of Weber's Der Freischütz (Christoph Marthaler) at Theater Basel and with Hèctor Parra's new opera Justice at the Grand Théâtre de Genève and Festspielhaus St. Pölten.

Guest conducting engagements so far have included the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Philharmonia Orchestra, SWR and WDR Sinfonieorchester, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg as well as Ensemble Modern and Klangforum Wien. He regularly conducts at opera houses in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich and Lyon, and has led performances of Berg's Wozzeck, Bartók's Blue Beard's Castle, Strauss's Salome, and Haas's Bluthaus, among others. He has also led numerous world premieres at the Salzburg Festival, Berliner Festspiele, Lucerne Festival, the Ruhrtriennale, and the Wiener Konzerthaus. He has recorded numerous works for radio and CD, in addition to having edited several books on contemporary opera.