Ensemble Phœnix Basel

In collaboration with “Musikpodium Zürich”

Is there a “Swissness” in terms of composing? Instead of an answer to this question, we confront the audience with three new works by Swiss composers from three generations, flanked by a work by our friend Erik Oña, who died much too early.

The youngest – Sebastian Meyer – is, like his teacher Erik Oña, in constant search of the best sound with reduced material, be it in terms of choice of instruments or compositional means.

Trumpet player, composer and improviser André Meier – also a former composition student of Erik Oña – deals in his compositional work mainly with algorithmic or machine processes, sonifications, modular and open forms.

The pianist and composer Jean-Jacques Dünki is also active as a musicologist, dealing with both historical performance practice (fortepiano and clavichord) and the composers of the New Viennese School and contemporary music. As a composer he is largely self-taught. He is writing a “Concertino” for cello and ensemble for the French cellist Pierre Strauch and us.

Program

Is there a “Swissness” in terms of composing? Instead of an answer to this question, we confront the audience with three new works by Swiss composers from three generations, flanked by a work by our friend Erik Oña, who died much too early.

The youngest – Sebastian Meyer – is, like his teacher Erik Oña, in constant search of the best sound with reduced material, be it in terms of choice of instruments or compositional means.

Trumpet player, composer and improviser André Meier – also a former composition student of Erik Oña – deals in his compositional work mainly with algorithmic or machine processes, sonifications, modular and open forms.

The pianist and composer Jean-Jacques Dünki is also active as a musicologist, dealing with both historical performance practice (fortepiano and clavichord) and the composers of the New Viennese School and contemporary music. As a composer he is largely self-taught. He is writing a “Concertino” for cello and ensemble for the French cellist Pierre Strauch and us.

Program

Walk-in music theater installation between intoxication and ritual

In their first opera production, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg create a posthumanist “Gesamtkunstwerk”. In doing so, they break down boundaries between man and machine, future and past, theater, visual art and virtual reality. The constantly rotating stage becomes the living space of a new kind of community. It cultivates a hieroglyphic language of movement and seems to live according to its own enigmatic rules. Inspired by the unconventional genius Albert Einstein, Philip Glass created a 20th century musical masterpiece that breaks all the rules of opera and follows no linear narrative structure. Repetitive patterns make time sensually tangible and put the audience into trance. The audience can move freely and experience the work individually.

other artists:

Performance/Dance – Suzan Boogaerdt, Tarren Johnson, Frank Willens, Tommy Cattin, Dominic Santia, Ixchel Mendoza Hernández
Basler Madrigalisten (conductor: Raphael Immoos) – Anna Miklashevich, Viola Molnar, Viviane Hasler (soprano), Barbara Schingnitz, Schoschana Kobelt, Leslie Leon (alto), Patrick Siegrist, Daniel Issa, Christopher Wattam (tenor), Othmar Sturm, Valerio Zanolli, Amir Tiroshi (bass)

Opéra, Grande Halle de La Villette, Paris

Production of Theater Basel in cooperation with the “Philharmonie de Paris” and “Festival d’Automne”

further information:

https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/fr/activite/opera/26308-philip-glass-einstein-beach

https://lavillette.com/programmation/s-kennedy-m-selg-p-glass_e1727

Program

With “Octandre” Edgard Varèse wrote an epoch-making work for a large chamber music ensemble and at the same time founded a new genre: Four woodwinds and three brass instruments are supplemented by a double bass to form an octet – with the complete omission of keyboard instruments and percussion. In our competition for young musicians “Phoenix Satellite” we have set the task to compose a new work in this instrumentation, which in some way refers to “Octandre” and circles this work like a satellite. The two prize winners will present their new “Satellite” compositions together with “Octandre” by Edgard Varèse at the end of this workshop.

The work “Monolith” by the German composer Thomas Bruttger was commissioned by the “Ensemble Aventure” (Freiburg i. Br.) in 1991.

Program

Our response to the global boycott of Russian artists in a pacifist frame of mind. These “other” voices from Russia must and should be heard, for they have significant things to say, whether older or younger.

The composer Galina Ustvolskaïa was once a favorite student of Dmitri Shostakovich and lived in seclusion in Siberia after the end of the Second World War until her death. Her works were hardly played until 1968. It was not until the 1990s that she achieved a certain degree of recognition abroad.

Alexander Khubeev uses multimedia means to set to music and illustrate the poem “Don’t leave the room” (1970) by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was expatriated from the Soviet Union in 1972. This poetic warning against the threat of the outside world takes on prophetic significance after the current “Corona” experiences.

The Russian composer Marina Khorkova lives and works in Berlin. In her work “collision” extreme registers, fragile and brutal sound gestures, static and unmediated eventfulness collide with each other in numerous contrasting sound fields. It was premiered by the ensemble “ascolta” in Stuttgart in 2015.

Program

Programming William Walton’s and Edith Sitwell’s once provocative work with Graham Valentine as narrator is a pleasure for us in different ways! The English poet Edith Sitwell became an icon of lesbian-gay movement not only through her poems, but also through her eccentric lifestyle and her uncompromisingly non-conformist views, provoking many a scandal with her appearance already in the early 1920s. At the premiere of “Façade,” she spoke her surrealist verses invisibly behind a painted screen with a hole cut out for a giant megaphone.

In combination with the commissions to the two young composers Asia Ahmetjanova from Latvia and Charlotte Torres from France, both living in Switzerland, current artistic dynamite is guaranteed.

Program

The Japanese composer Noriko Hisada is a quite extraordinary voice of Japan, whose music is unjustly performed far too rarely. The “ensemble für neue musik zürich” has been promoted the music of this composer, who was still unknown in Europe at the time, for over 30 years and premiered her quintet “Prognostication” in Boswil in 1991 with Jürg Henneberger at the piano. EPhB now presents this work together with the seven-part ensemble piece “Led by the Yellow Bricks”, written 25 years later and inspired by Lyman Frank Baum’s children’s book “The Wizard of Oz”.

Program

Once a year, EPhB invites experimental musicians with a rather non-academic background to collaborate. These artists come from fields such as noise, free improvisation, sound art, etc. The young percussionist and improviser Camille Emaille and the Zurich composer, sound artist, theater musician and improviser Thomas Peter will each conceive and curate a concert half. In this case, the ensemble does not “merely” implement a musical text, but participates in the composition in a direct way.

Program