http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/fear-and-loathing-in-london-the-death-of-klinghoffer-is-staged-in-the-capital-for-the-first-time-6671388.html

Listen:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bllz5

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• • Alex Needham
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012 17.51 GMT
  • Article history

The Death Of Klinghoffer by John Adam, here in a Scottish Opera performance, will be staged by War Horse director Tom Morris at the English National Opera in London. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

When Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann was a student 25 years ago, “if you had more than 30 people at a concert it was a failure because it was populist crap”. Today, there are growing signs that contemporaryclassical music is shrugging off its elitist reputation, with audiences flocking to work previously regarded as austere and impenetrable.

“It’s the weirdest pieces which get the strongest reaction,” says Brönnimann. “Prometeo by Nono is an extremely difficult piece to listen to – two hours long with no break, either extremely soft or extremely loud, and with the audience in darkness surrounded by the performers – but it gets an amazing response. People are looking for something to get their teeth into.”

Programmers are working hard to meet this appetite for sonic adventure. Last week, the Southbank Centre in London announced a year-long festival which will bring to life The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross‘s250,000-selling history of 20th-century classical music, accompanied by a series on BBC4.

Before that starts in 2013, a plethora of “difficult” works will be performed in UK concert halls. From next month, the English National Opera (ENO) is staging four operas written in the past 30 years, including John Adams‘s The Death of Klinghoffer, about the 1985 hijacking of an ocean liner by the Palestine Liberation Front, conducted by Brönnimann and staged by War Horse director Tom Morris.

In March, there are festivals of minimalist music in Glasgow and north-east England, and a John Cage-inspired “happening” called Musicircuswill be staged at the ENO, involving audience members, with musicians including John Paul Jones, formerly of Led Zeppelin.

In April, a festival devoted to Conlon Nancarrow hits the Southbank. Nancarrow, whose fans include Stephen Fry, composed music which is impossible to play except by a mechanical piano. “It makes you laugh out loud,” says the centre’s head of contemporary culture, Gillian Moore. “You’ve got two or three completely different time signatures going on. You think there must be a third hand, they must have three brains, and then you realise it’s a machine – but it’s music of amazing accessibility.”

In May, Philip Glass‘s opera Einstein on the Beach – five hours long, with no plot or interval – will make its UK debut at the Barbican in London. Last weekend, the venue offered “total immersion” in the work of British composer Jonathan Harvey, who melds orchestras and electronics.

Moore says the increased audience for these works is the result of a campaign to reach people interested in the cutting edge of other contemporary art forms, rather than those who prefer to hear Beethoven. In 2003, when artistic director of the London Sinfonietta, Moore inaugurated a series of concerts which programmed avant garde classical works alongside music by artists on Warp records. “We were hugely nervous but we wanted to make the connections between Aphex Twin and John Cage, Squarepusher and Stockhausen.”

The concerts were a success, and Moore found the people who attended had “an almost unlimited appetite for music of richness and complexity”. Better still, they kept coming back. “Immediately afterwards we did a weekend of Xenakis and it sold out. A lot of the people had been at the Warp project, including a lot of the artists themselves. I remember picking the Aphex Twin out of the returns queue for tickets because it was so mobbed, and that was wall to wall Xenakis – no frills.”

Brönnimann confirms that many people arrive at the avant garde of contemporary music via the wilder shores of pop. “I did a tour withJoanna Newsom, 15-minute songs arranged by Van Dyke Parks, and the audience who came are the ones who look at contemporary music. They look for something that goes deeper, to undiscovered worlds – the bottom of the sea.”

Such audiences have a hunger for the new, says Esa-Pekka Salonen, principal conductor of the Philharmonia. “There’s a trend in our culture to be constantly up to date because we’re connected through the internet, and an art form that would be entirely backward-looking and museum-like would make no sense. People are interested in what’s happening right now.”

Some also clearly enjoy the challenge of pitting themselves against some of the most forbidding art works in the world – an attitude encouraged by soprano Barbara Hannigan, whose performance of Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli at the Southbank last year had, she says, even musician colleagues in the audience “saying ‘I was scared.’ But afterwards, they said ‘My God, I was touched.’ ”

Hannigan cites a 2010 Guardian piece by Alex Ross bemoaning that modern classical music is not widely enjoyed in the same way as modern art or architecture. “He said that audiences expect classical music to be ‘a spa treatment for tired souls’. I was thinking, maybe the public needs to think of it as a deep tissue massage. It’s almost violent – but you know you’re going to come out of it feeling a sense of release. If they go in knowing it’s going to be intense and heavy, they come out with a feeling of being changed, of accomplishment, of going through something which was quite good for them.”

The composer George Benjamin, whose opera Written on the Skin will debut in July, points out that modern classical music relies on individuals to champion it, like Salonen and Vladimir Jurowski, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic. “I came out of Pli Selon Pli very deeply fired up and inspired by it, but it only gets played once or twice a decade in the UK. Even more so than film or visual arts, we have to have not only promoters but performers who are willing to pay the extra expense of rehearsing new pieces and of taking a risk and knowing how to conduct these very difficult works – it’s not only the public that are part of this equation.”

Cellist and music curator Oliver Coates says that while contemporary classical music has lost the academic air which made it so off-putting, it still requires effort. “I don’t think classical music should be put on in bars and clubs – people shouldn’t drink or talk over it, they need to be immersed in it. It remains quite serious music.”

Moore recommends listening first on Spotify (see her picks below), adding that some awareness of context is required. “That’s why The Rest is Noise festival is going to be great, because it shows why certain music was made at certain times, like Stockhausen after the war saying he couldn’t write four beats in a bar because it reminded him of jackboots.

“So he exploded everything and created rhythms which were like stars and harmonies – constellations of sounds from the scientific world.”

Brönnimann and Salonen agree that the shock of the new has worn off some works, making them more accessible to modern audiences. “So many of these sounds have become more daily for us,” says Brönnimann. “Just as contemporary art has filitered into fashion or design, if you listen to film music or video game music, people are getting used to expecting sounds not to be straightforward but to have a life of their own.”

Nevertheless, works like Role Player by Christian Lindberg, in which Brönnimann was “shot” by the soloist, then carried offstage while the piece finished without him, are clearly not for everyone. “The great thing about contemporary music is that no one walks out and can’t remember what they heard,” says Brönnimann. “Some people hate it, some love it, but they all talk about it. That’s the response you want from art.”

Curious?

Gillian Moore picks five modern classical piece to get you started

 

Gyorgy Ligeti, Atmospheres

Shimmering clouds of orchestral sound, the soundtrack to Kubrick’s 2001

Conlon Nancarrow, Player Piano Studies

Superhuman piano music, hilariously impossible, crazy rhythms

 

Jonathan Harvey Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco

The sounds of a boy’s voice and a bell morph into each other through computer magic

 

Toru Takemitsu, Tree-Line

Gorgeous, exquisite Japanese modernism tinged with impressionistic harmonies

 

Louis Andriessen, De Staat

Hardcore Dutch minimalism: brass, voices, electric guitars

 

Listen on Spotify: http://spoti.fi/Ao9Fbm

Arriésguese a vivir la Orquesta Sinfónica

Artículo | Enero 18, 2012 – 10:12pm

El ánimo de permanente renovación que la hace siempre joven, vigente y admirada es lo que caracteriza a la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia, la cual cuenta con más de cien años de tradición.
Tras haber emprendido una nueva etapa hace nueve años, la Sinfónica Nacional atraviesa por su mejor momento artístico. El maestro suizo Baldur Brönnimann, en la batuta como titular, le ha inyectado a la institución, que cuenta con 70 músicos, nuevos bríos y un dinamismo que se ha visto reflejado tanto en su cal0.idad artística y su repertorio como en la respuesta del público.
En ello directores invitados de la calidad de maestros como Andrés Orozco, Gustavo Dudamel, Rosen Milanov, André Smith y Pablo González, entre otros, han tenido igualmente un importante nivel de contribución.
En más de 500 conciertos ofrecidos en plazas, coliseos y tarimas ha llegado directamente a más de 700.000 espectadores que han escuchado en vivo un vasto repertorio de clásicos sinfónicos de compositores como Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak y Tchaikovsky, contemporáneos como Piazzola, Ligetti, Copland, Jobim, Villalobos, Ginastera, así como obras de los compositores colombianos Blas Emilio Atehortúa, Jaime León y Luis Antonio Escobar, y autores populares como Lucho Bermúdez, Rafael Escalona, Arnulfo Briceño, Petronio Álvarez y Jorge Velosa.
Han acompañado a la Sinfónica los solistas Rodolfo Mederos, Pepe Romero, Johannes Mosser, Vicente Amigo, Benjamin Schmid, Jutta Puchhammer, Gabriela Montero, Valeriano Lanchas, Andrea Bocceli y Juan Diego Flórez.
En sus giras fuera del país la Sinfónica ha recibido igualmente el reconocimiento del público y cosechado ovaciones en importantes escenarios.
A partir del 2012 la Sinfónica Nacional se prepara para emprender un nuevo direccionamiento estratégico que demandará retos como adoptar una nueva imagen institucional más acorde con los tiempos; enfocar provocativamente su programación artística e introducir un lenguaje de comunicación más fresco y en permanente innovación que implementarán de la mano de los nuevos medios y tecnologías.
Que Colombia entera se arriesgue vivirla es el propósito de la Asociación Nacional de Música Sinfónica, empresa privada, técnica y profesional sin ánimo de lucro que, como ente rector de la Sinfónica Nacional, se prepara para hacer de esta una institución contemporánea, querida por el público y símbolo de prosperidad nacional.

Nueva dirección
Desde el pasado agosto la Asociación Sinfónica Nacional cambió de Gerencia, quedando ésta en manos de Claudia Franco Vélez, quien desde el inicio de su administración ha sido pieza clave en el éxito de espectáculos como Navidad de Película con la Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia presentado el pasado diciembre.
Este equipo de profesionales, con el apoyo del Ministerio de Cultura en cabeza de Mariana Garcés Córdoba, tiene como objetivo principal consolidar la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional y sus músicos como un icono para la cultura colombiana. Algunas metas para el 2012 son llenar las salas de todos los espectáculos de la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia en las ciudades y países que visite. En últimas, además acercar a diversos públicos con actividades innovadoras, dando vital importancia a experiencias sensoriales completas y únicas.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/11/21/politics-at-the-opera/

Politics at the Opera

By Baldur Bronnimann
Battle of Ideas
Monday, 21 November 2011 at 6:00 am

In early 2012, ENO will be staging a new production of John Adams ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’, based on the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship ‘Achille Lauro’ in 1985. No opera in recent years has caused such debate. Personally, I think that all good music is by nature provocative, but working on the opera I couldn’t help but ask myself one question: ‘Why is it that people get so upset with this piece?’ Is it that opera is just too close for comfort?

I thought that if ‘Klinghoffer’ was a play or a movie, it would simply have been seen as a very individual and powerful way of seeing the Middle East conflict from the perspective of the people involved: the captain, the ship’s crew, the passengers and some of the hijackers. But it was clearly a different thing to have a hijacker speak or sing. The fact that Klinghoffer touched such a nerve is evidence of why opera is so relevant.

Having worked in both Israel and in Palestine, I quickly realised that everything – unavoidably – becomes a political statement, even just the simple fact of visiting the place or talking about the situation, or looking from the point of view of those living on the other side. And that’s exactly what ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ does: it exposes the listener by giving a voice – albeit accompanied by a very personal and deeply felt musical language – to all the different people who were accidentally thrown together in the strangest of circumstances aboard the ‘Achille Lauro’.

In creating an opera out of the story of Leon Klinghoffer’s death, John Adams faced up to a genre that is often seen as a safe haven from reality, partly because of its artificiality. The opera house itself still acts a refuge, where everything is a bit retro, the tunes opulent and the champagne cold. And if the audience doesn’t like the storyline, it’s quite easy to block out, because the text is usually hard to understand or in a different language. You can easily sit and just absorb the top notes or stare at the décor. But sometimes I am stupefied at what gets people upset in the opera house: Some naked bodies? Hearing some weird tunes? Hello?! This all seems quite tame compared to other art forms, let alone what the media exposes us to on a daily basis! There must be something else to it.

Sitting in a dark room for a few hours listening to music, to people’s voices, to a hyper reality of thoughts being expanded, to a dead body singing an aria or to the cumulative force of a chorus giving voice to a people’s sufferings. This has nothing to do with flicking through a few news headlines on your iPad or watching a 30 second news broadcast about a suicide attack or a settlement being built. Opera takes time. And no-one can watch the bombs drop from afar – it’s in your face.

Whoever looks for naturalism in opera is looking in the wrong place, because it is the most un-naturalistic of all genres. But that is exactly its strength – to give voice to the unspeakable, to go beyond the words and, with music, go towards a deeper perspective and more human way of understanding. For some people, that’s what is too much to take in Klinghoffer. Opera itself is different. Music deepens and ‘humanises’ characters – more so than the text alone does. And that’s what makes it uncomfortable, because in Klinghoffer, even the hijackers are being humanised. Everything is so much easier if hijackers don’t have a soul. It’s the spirit of the Bush years – you’re either with us or against us. ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ doesn’t take a position as such, but it gives a voice to everyone involved, from the hijackers to the grandmother. This in itself is already provocative. But even more so when it’s opera that is telling the story: the opera house is neither the place for absorbing at a comfortable distance nor for brain-dead consumption: it’s a place for the unspeakable, for involvement, engagement and exposure. Somehow the fact they are upsetting is in the very nature of great works – they get under your skin. And that’s exactly what John Adams’ ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ does.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Institute of Ideas’ Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Baldur Brönnimann regularly conducts the major orchestras and new music ensembles around the world and from February 2012 he will be conducting ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ in ENO’s major new production. Known for his eagerness to push artistic boundaries and to embrace projects beyond the traditional concert, Brönnimann is Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, as well as Artistic Director of Norway’s BIT20 Ensemble. www.baldur.info

Soprano - Raphaële Kennedy
Soprano - Valérie Philippin
Mezzo - Ebba Rydh
Baritone- Romain Bischoff

Elektronics - Peter Plessas/IEM Graz

Video - Jacob Schokking/Holland House

Aaron Copland – Music for the Theatre

Leonard Bernstein – Three Dance Episodes from “On the Town”

music by Charlie Parker

Jukka Perko, saxophone