Saturday January 19th and Sunday January 20th: Still very much jet lagged, Jessie and I both slept in past our 10am discussion time on Saturday so can't report much on conversations surrounding the previous night's concert. On Sunday there were two string quartet + electronics concerts, the first featuring the diotima quartet, the second the arditti quartet. On the Saturday we were fortunate enough to attend a full afternoon of rehearsals with the arditti quartet working on the two pieces with electronics on their programme- a world premiere of a new piece by Joshua Fineberg and Georg Freidrich Haas' 7th string quartet. While much of the detail of the rehearsing was lost on us (these were final rehearsal stages, fixing/finessing details of electronics in the space more than rehearsing the music- a lot of quiet muttering in German, head scratching, etc.) it was very fruitful to hear these two pieces several times before the concerts on Sunday.
Its worth mentioning some of the specifics of Joshua Fineberg's piece, as it marks a first time collaboration between IRCAM and the Experimentalstudio des SWR, previously rival electroacoustic studios in France and Germany respectively. We also were able to talk with the composer in some detail about the piece over dinner before the orchestra concert. It is a distinctly strange work, in which the string quartet are sat towards the back of the stage, far from the audience, in rehearsal formation (forming a square facing each other rather than in the arc pictured below) and playing with heavy lead practice mutes such that the acoustic quartet cannot actually be heard during the piece. Instead what we hear is a series of virtual quartet sounds generated by the electronics via a process called (if memory serves me correctly) spectral envelope filtering or processing- which takes the stripped-down, basic sound of the muted string quartet and builds a huge variety of textures out of it. The trajectory of the piece is one of moving from relatively 'realistic' string quartet sounds towards far more alien sonic environments, corresponding to Fineberg's strong interest in nested fictions (an interest that is most clear in his opera
Lolita).
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A view of the Arditti quartet and part of the mixing desk;
rehearsing Georg Friedrich Haas' 7. Streichquartett |
Saturday evening was the orchestra concert, featuring the
Chaya Czernowin orchestra piece mentioned
here. This also included pieces by Johannes Maria Staud (a very strange sequence of musics), Michael Jarrell (a largely uninspiring, flat work- although thinking back to it now perhaps something attractive about its slick- almost oily- surface), and an early piece by Georg Freidrich Haas,
...sodaß ich's hernach mit einem Blick gleichsam wei ein schönes Bild... im Geist übersehe for string orchestra from 1990/91. This latter piece was, aside from the Czernowin, the most interesting. A sequence of panels, some specifically directed and gestural, others creating fields of sound from an aleatoric implementation of a specific playing technique (a la Penderecki or Lutosławski), and one in particular quoting or in the style of Mozart (to whom the quote that makes up the title is attributed), becoming gradually blurred by sustained tones, creating a sort of veil of dissonance behind which the Mozart seems to continue.
