[sold out] Asko|Schönberg & Colin Currie

A very warm welcome to Klarafestival!

Flanders Festival Brussels, Klara and our partners are delighted to greet you once again. “I believe audiences aren’t just listening. They are actively contributing”, festival artist Barbara Hannigan remarked in an interview. Concerts are an interaction between the audience, artists and anyone who is contributing to those magic moments in front of or behind the scenes. Together we ‘become’ music. 

As a conductor and soprano, Hannigan is a global reference point. With her, classical music becomes a contemporary and unique experience. This is an inspiration to Klarafestival as the largest broadcast festival in Belgium. Her versatile talent is sure to enrapture you, as is that of the many Belgian and international artists who connect past and present with musical stories.

Klarafestival opens in style with Hannigan as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. After that, you will hear and see her with young musicians from her mentorship project Equilibrium Young Artists. In no fewer than 25 concerts, we present top talent including Les Talens Lyriques, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Vilde Frang, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Víkingur Ólafsson. Klarafestival also treasures creation. The film concert Reich/Richter as a symbiosis of Gerhard Richter’s paintings and the music of Steve Reich; the creation Counterforces by composer Frederik Croene to text by poet Dominique de Groen; and the music theatre production Prey by Kris Verdonck with a composition by Annelies Van Parys will surprise you!

This and all other concerts are possible thanks to the collaboration with our cultural partners: Bozar, Flagey, Kaaitheater, Théâtre Varia, Muntpunt, Concertgebouw Brugge and DE SINGEL. Thanks to our private partners KPMG, Proximus, Brewery Omer Vander Ghinste, Belfius, Interparking and the players of Belgium’s National Lottery. We are grateful for the support of the Flemish Community and the Brussels Capital Region. And finally, thanks to Klara and VRT: there would be no broadcast festival without their valued collaboration.

Joost Fonteyne

Artistic director of Klarafestival

A conversation between Steve Reich and George Jackson (conductor Ensemble Intercontemporain) - November 20, 2021

GJ: How did this project with Gerhard Richter evolve?

SR: It goes back to 2009. I used to play occasionally with the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern — Drumming Part 1 and Music for 18 Musicians. Richter was having a show at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and wanted me to play Drumming Part 1 with members of the ensemble inside the show and to play Music for 18 Musicians at the nearby Cologne Philharmonie, all of which we did. It went extremely well and Richter and I had a chance to meet. We didn’t spend much time together but there was warm, mutual respect and admiration. 

Seven years later, in 2016, I heard that he would like to discuss a new project. He suggested meeting at the Marian Goodman Gallery where he shows in New York. We met there and he showed me his Patterns book. It starts with one of his abstract paintings from the ’90s. He scanned a photo of the painting into a computer and then cut the scan in half and took each half, cut that in half and two of the four quarters he reversed into mirror images. He then repeated this process of divide, mirror, repeat from half to quarter, eighth, 16th, 32nd, all the way up to 4,096th. The net effect is to go from an abstract painting to a series of gradually smaller anthropomorphic “creatures” (since the mirroring produces bilateral symmetry) to still smaller “psychedelic” abstractions and slowly to very fine color stripes. Richter said he was making a film of the book together with Corinna Belz and would I consider writing the music? I said it was a very interesting project and that I would like to see some of the film. 

The film turned out to be the book backwards and considerably less systematic. The structure was very appealing and I agreed to do the music. It began with what Belz referred to as ‘2-pixel’ color stripes, and the music starts with a two 16th note oscillating pattern. When the film goes to four ‘pixels’, the music moves onto a four 16th note pattern, then to eight, and sixteen. The changes were not made exactly in sync, only loosely coordinated. As the ‘pixel count’ continued to grow, I began to think, this is going to get ridiculous, so at that point I began introducing longer note values—initially eighth notes, and later as the count grew, to quarter notes. By the middle of the film, as the ‘pixel count’ grows enormous I started the cross fade section and the music really slows via half notes held over several bars. Later, as the pixel count begins to diminish, the music finally moves back into eighths and then sixteenths, ending with the color stripes in their most intense rapid movement. The timing was the structural outline of the music. I had a timecode window up on my laptop and that was the basic overall structure of the music rather than any reaction to the imagery.

GJ: So, in that respect, it’s a piece that potentially could be performed in a concert format rather than with the film. 

SR: You bet! It certainly can be done by itself in concert format. Here it is on this recording and I’m very impressed with the performance! It has a wonderful ‘sustained’ quality. The notes are held for their full values and everything feels connected. It has an almost dream-like quality. 

GJ: I watched an interview about ten years ago, before Reich/Richter, where you happened to mention that you’re often drawn to two sharp key signatures, whether that’s B minor or D major or modal.

SR: Yes, I’m often hooked on two sharps. (laughs) 

GJ: That’s interesting because that’s exactly where we start from here, but also moving through these different harmonies before returning back to B minor in the third section. This also includes the idea of harmonic ambiguity in the middle register: it could be F major, it could be D minor, but then one of the two pianos, particularly in the opening 16th note section, fades in and almost confirms where we might be, often in a dynamic that’s gradually the loudest in the ensemble, before fading away and allowing the ambiguity to return.

SR: Right. I liked the piano low repeated notes which fade in and out just using the pedal. - Earlier, you asked me what influence, if any, does the film imagery or overall pixel count timing had on the music and my answer was the imagery, hardly at all, but the pixel count timing, was the structural outline of the music. I will add that my favorite imagery was actually the bands of color, the stripes. The stripes were ‘two pixels’ and the music with them was two note oscillations.

GJ: Yeah, okay, talking of pixels and oscillations, we haven’t mentioned the relationship to Runner and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra.

SR: Right, just before I started work on this project, I completed two pieces: Runner and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra. Both pieces end with an oscillation between two gradually changing notes played by almost all the instruments. I began to think, wouldn’t it be great to start that way and see where it will lead? When I was approached by Richter and Belz who explained that the film started with ‘two pixels’ it struck me, “ah ha!” This is the latch point where I go from the end of these other two pieces to the beginning of an unknown new one. It was exactly what I was looking for. So, that was a very strong inducement to do this project. Absolutely.

GJ: And I suppose in a way that cements the idea that a concert program that begins with Runner and continues on with Reich/Richter is an ideal example of something continuous.

SR: Yes, and you’d have the forces. As a matter of fact, you’d have more forces in Runner than needed in Reich/Richter. Funny, it seems like Reich/Richter conjures a feeling of larger instrumental forces. In any event, that would make a good program. 

Asko|Schönberg

Asko|Schönberg (NL) is a leading ensemble for new music. Its key pillars are quality, experimentation and innovative programming with a focus on current affairs. With a rich network of musicians, conductors, composers, versatile young makers and partners from various art disciplines, Asko|Schönberg contributes to the ‘making of now’. The ensemble acts as an accessible platform that with innovative and energetic partners builds on the continual development of contemporary composition in all its varying forms. From its home base in Amsterdam, the ensemble operates across the globe. Both the leading collection of the great 20th-century composers and the very latest 21st-century work are performed on concert stages, at festivals and in interdisciplinary performances.

askoschoenberg.nl

Colin Currie

“Currie is at the summit of percussion performance today”, according to the British music magazine Gramophone. Colin Currie (VK), a true champion of new music, performs as a soloist and in an ensemble line-up. He is a favourite soloist of many contemporary composers and conductors, and plays with the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. As a dynamic and adventurous soloist, he is committed to creating new music and giving composition commissions. Accordingly in 2015 he was recognised by the Royal Philharmonic Society, who presented him with the Instrumentalist Award. Currie has premiered works by composers such as Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Louis Andriessen and Sir James MacMillan. In 2006 he set up the Colin Currie Group that specialises in the music of Reich. 

www.colincurrie.com

Corinna Belz 

Corinna Belz (DE) studied philosophy, art history and media science in Cologne and Berlin. She has written and directed numerous film productions. Her first film about the work of Gerhard Richter, The Cologne Cathedral Window (2007), won the World Media Gold Award - Art Documentaries. Her long cinema documentary Gerhard Richter Painting (2011) received many highly favourable reviews and was awarded the German Film Prize. The film was screened in numerous European and American cities. In 2017 a new collaboration with Gerhard Richter was launched. Out of this came the abstract film for the production Reich/Richter, with the composition by Steve Reich. De première took place in April 2019 in New York.

Theun Mosk

Theun Mosk (NL) fervently believes in stacking up ideas and in the benefit of never limiting yourself to a single style or technique. Mosk works as a theatre maker, set and lighting designer and makes autonomous installations. In 2007 he received the Charlotte Köhler Prize and he was twice selected for the Prague Quadrennial. For his significant contribution to Dutch theatre, he received the Proscenium Prize in 2017. He was the set and lighting designer for the multimedia opera Upload by Michel van der Aa, which in 2021 won the coveted International Opera Award.  

after the concert

the confessional

Do you need to pour out your heart after a performance? Then come to De Biechtstoel [The Confessional]! An invisible confessor will ask you questions about what you have just seen and heard. The sound of these conversations is recorded and then edited with images created live during the performance by an illustrator, resulting in a compilation of audience reactions to that evening.

Asko|Schönberg

Ingrid Geerlings, flute

Tom Sargeaunt, flute

Evert Weidner, oboe

Arthur Klaassens, oboe

Bram Boesschen Hospers, clarinet

Vincent Martig, clarinet

Pauline Post piano, electric organ

Saskia Lankhoorn piano, electric organ

Colin Currie, electric organ

Tim Sabel, electric organ

Joey Marijs, percussion  

Jeroen Geevers, percussion 

Jellantsje de Vries, violin

Emmy Storms, violin 

Liesbeth Steffens, viola

Sebastiaan van Halsema, cello