{"id":299,"date":"2016-09-28T13:52:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-28T11:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/?p=299"},"modified":"2017-12-11T14:31:59","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T13:31:59","slug":"schostakowitsch-klangwolke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/2016\/09\/28\/schostakowitsch-klangwolke\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"A Shostakovich Sound Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"It\u2019s with a very special sound experiment that Wien Modern<\/em>, in cooperation with the mdw, will once again be traveling unconventional paths\u2014in keeping with this year\u2019s festival motto of \u201cThe ultimate questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going? And where the devil are we now, anyway?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"Adamas
Adamas Quartett \u00a9Julia Wesely<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906\u20131975) is considered one of Russia\u2019s most productive and versatile 20th-century composers. At the age of just 19, his 1st Symphony made him world-famous. And over the course of his life, he would compose 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets as well as numerous works in a diverse range of genres including film soundtracks, choral music, and music for the stage. Now, Wien Modern<\/em> is planning the firstever simultaneous performance of all 15 of his string quartets in the same concert hall. Under its new artistic director Bernhard G\u00fcnther, this festival for contemporary music is daring to conduct an experiment that takes up the\u2014by no means new\u2014tradition of musical collage: as early as 1753, in fact, the young Joseph Haydn encouraged other musicians to join him on Tiefer Graben in Vienna, spread out along the street, and play whatever they felt like playing at the moment.\u00b9<\/p>\n

Wien Modern will have 15 string quartets\u2014including five from the mdw \u2013 University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna\u2014appear in the Great Hall of the Vienna Konzerthaus to perform all 15 quartets by Shostakovich at the same time, sometimes in synch and sometimes individually. This concert\u2019s dramaturgical concept aims to create a variety-packed listening experience for the audience, which will be free to quietly move throughout the concert hall (the seating of which will be removed for the evening). The timing of the various entrances according Bernhard G\u00fcnther\u2019s own concept will be rehearsed beforehand\u2014but the quartets\u2019 respective interpretations will be entirely free, with no conductor in charge.<\/p>\n

\"Bernhard
Bernhard G\u00fcnther is the new artistic director of Wien Modern \u00a9Anna Katharina Scheidegger ZeitR\u00e4ume Basel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Johannes Meissl, of the Joseph Haydn Department for Chamber Music, Early Music, and Contemporary Music, will select five ensembles from the mdw to participate in this exciting project: \u201cWhen Bernhard G\u00fcnther told me about this project, I was immediately fascinated by the idea. To me, and from an aesthetic standpoint, this \u2018sound cloud\u2019 is something like a radical continuation of Gustav Mahler and Charles Ives.\u201d So Haydn\u2019s appeal to his friends can most certainly be seen as a foreshadowing of what, later on, Charles Ives sought to achieve with his collages. \u201cThis simultaneous, multi-layered quality is something we all know from everyday life, but it also has a long tradition as one of many aesthetic strategies of contemporary music,\u201d says G\u00fcnther. \u201cAnd in selecting the ensembles, we looked not only for strong Shostakovich interpretations but also for the proper concentration and coolness that are needed for the far more \u2018contemporary\u2019 density and simultaneity that will arise in this situation, with 14 other quartets in the same hall. Because while some of them will be placed as far apart from each other as possible, other quartets will be positioned back-to-back,\u201d continues the festival head. The spatial and musical centre of the performance will be Shostakovich\u2019s final and longest string quartet: it will be interpreted by the Arditti Quartet, which was founded in 1974 and has been heard at Wien Modern practically every year since the festival\u2019s founding 29 years ago. Directly beside them will be New York\u2019s JACK Quartet with the 14th String Quartet,\u00a0and another three quartets each will be drawn from Hamburg\u2019s Ensemble Resonanz and the soloist-ensemble Kaleidoskop from Berlin. The selection of the mdw\u2019s five quartets was left up to the university, with full trust placed in Professor Meissl. Alongside student ensembles that are already successful internationally, such as the Giocoso Quartet (which won several awards at the 2015 Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition), the equally successful Adamas Quartet, and Quatuor Akilone from Paris (winner of the 2016 Bordeaux Competition<\/em>), the mdw has also chosen the Doreen Quartet and the Atalante Quartet. And in addition to the mdw ensembles, two quartets from the MUK (Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna) will also be participating. \u201cThis will be more than just a new listening experience for the audience: it will also be an entirely new playing experience for the participating ensembles,\u201d says Johannes Meissl. Bernhard G\u00fcnther elaborates: \u201cAlongside \u2018solo\u2019 moments where just one of the many quartets in the hall will be heard, there will also be periods when\u2014depending on where you\u2019re standing\u2014one quartet nearby will be heard very clearly while others will only be heard off in the distance, and there will also be dense moments of simultaneity in which the entire hall will be filled with playing string quartets.\u201d<\/p>\n

The festival\u2019s new artistic director considers Dmitry Shostakovich to be among the main points of reference in 20th-century quartet literature. \u201cRegardless of whether one likes his music, his quartets play a more prominent role in the repertoires of numerous institutions and ensembles than those by most others from this period. Some will ask themselves why this is being programmed at Wien Modern, as well\u2014perhaps because they don\u2019t consider Shostakovich to be contemporary enough. But this approach to him most definitely is! These works are characterised by a certain robustness, featuring long passages with repetitions, striking solos, highly dramatic fortissimo outbursts, and an inherently high pressure; if they were at the opposite extreme\u2014very fragile, complex, introverted compositions constantly on the verge of silence\u2014I\u2019d be less prone to trying this kind of experiment.\u201d After all, it was the very fact that Shostakovich seems to be constantly wrestling with existential questions in his quartets that inspired this simultaneous performance. \u201cIn this quasi-private genre of the string quartet,\u201d says G\u00fcnther, \u201che was less closely observed by the state apparatus and its censors than in his symphonies, which always had a more strongly representative quality to them.\u201d Altogether, this year\u2019s festival programme features an especially high number of string quartets, with the abovementioned \u201cultimate questions\u201d accounting for the stronger focus on this intimate genre. Altogether, 19 different string quartets will be coming to the festival to perform\u2014and alongside the works by Shostakovich, quartets by composers including Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg and Harrison Birtwistle will also be heard.<\/p>\n

In preparing for 11 November 2016, the involved ensembles are attempting above all to realise autonomous interpretations of their respective quartets. And this single evening concert is to present a sweeping survey of four eventful decades in Shostakovich\u2019s life\u2014from 1938 to 1974. So \u201cthose attending are invited to give themselves over completely, with their eyes and their ears, to this overall sound event,\u201d concludes Meissl in eager anticipation of this exceptional evening.<\/p>\n

\u00b9 Neuwirth, Olga. Neuwirth \u00fcber Haydn. Erschienen im profil 14\/09<\/em>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s with a very special sound experiment that Wien Modern, in cooperation with the mdw, will once again be traveling unconventional paths\u2014in keeping with this year\u2019s festival motto of \u201cThe ultimate questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going? And where the devil are we now, anyway?\u201d Dmitry Shostakovich (1906\u20131975) is considered one …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[95,337,35,335,111,80,336,110],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-2016-3","tag-bernhard-guenther","tag-chamber-music","tag-dmitri-schostakowitsch","tag-festival","tag-kammermusik","tag-schostakowitsch","tag-wien-modern"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":475,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}