Various venues, Ostrava, Czech Republic
Like the Huddersfield Festival, Ostrava Days is located in the centre of a huge industrial region. The air in eastern Moravia is clean now, unemployment high, and the built environment is like a communist theme park. Concerts are held in a vast Soviet-era arts complex, created for its worker heroes – but the figures in the monument outside my hotel now appear baffled and lost. The enormous party headquarters opposite the complex is undergoing conversion to a multi-storey carpark. All the same, the town does have a certain post-industrial charm.
This is the fifth biennial event, and like many festivals, it depends on one person’s creative vision and drive – composer, bandleader, flautist and controversialist Petr Kotik. Though Ostrava is an unlikely location for a New Music festival of high international standing, Czech composer Leos Janáček is a local hero. Kotik himself, born in Prague, left in 1969 for New York.
Young composers attend classes with such luminaries as Christian Wolff, Phill Niblock, Michael J Schumacher and Kotik, and have their works performed at the festival, which focuses on large-scale pieces, played by the resident Janáček Philharmonic and Ostravská Banda. The opening concert featured Kotik as soloist in Morton Feldman’s Flute And Orchestra (1977–78) – amazingly, performed only twice since its premiere. The piece, incidentally, is dedicated to Edgard Varèse, whose modern classic Amériques was the climax of the closing concert. Conductor Peter Rundel – a model of calm, lucid leadership throughout the festival – coaxed a gripping performance from the Janáček Philharmonic, despite its wary attitude to contemporary music.
It’s a paradox that Bernhard Lang stressed in his composition class: composers now confront a classical orchestra whose operating system dates from around 1790. That’s especially problematic for figures such as Lang and Elliot Sharp – also featured this year – who came up outside the classical system, in their case through jazz and Improv. With Beat Furrer, Lang is a leading figure in the so-called Third Viennese School. His Monadologie II (2008), featured in a concert for large orchestra with The Janáček Philharmonic, used characteristic looping ‘repetitions’ on material from Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote. Inspired, says Lang, by the German philosopher Leibniz’s Monadology, it’s a soundworld that intersects Cage and Lachenmann, rock and free Improv – a heady mixture. The same concert presented Elliott Sharp’s recent composition On Corlear’s Hook, named after the district of New York, and Kotik’s Fragment for large orchestra. The festival also saw the premiere of Christian Wolff’s Rhapsody (2009) for three chamber orchestras, calling on the festival’s complete conducting resources. Wolff’s austere compositions reflect his character – self-sufficient, no ego.
British composer Richard Ayres’s postmodern response to the orchestra is to clear its gestures of their conventional meaning. His pervasively self-referential No 30 (NONcerto For Orchestra, Cello And High Soprano) – featuring a grunting cellist way out of his depth, and soprano with megaphone – challenged the nature of the musical work. Kotik’s Ostravská Banda gave compelling performances of Charles Ives’s wonderful The Unanswered Question, and György Ligeti’s fearsomely complex Piano Concerto.
Berlin based improvising group Phosphor – consisting of Andrea Neumann on piano, Axel Dörner on trumpet and laptop, Annette Krebs on electroacoustic guitar, Michael Renkel on acoustic guitar and laptop, Ignaz Schick on turntables and electronics and Burkhard Beins on percussion – developed a spacious, collectively improvised Reductionism. The interplay between acoustic and electronic sound is evocative, notably in Andrea Neumann’s electronic manipulation of sounds from dismantled or ‘inside’ piano, with strings, resonance board and metal frame. At a late evening instrumental concert, Robin Hayward’s solo Release, Tone, Redial explored acoustic noise on an E flat tuba. Finally, at Club Parnik, his brass ensemble Zinc And Copper Works performed Phill Niblock’s Disseminate, a compelling heterophonic dronescape. Using half-valve and muting techniques, and attaching sensors for computer interaction, the ensemble treated their instruments as noise generators.
Club Parnik also inaugurated bassist John Eckhardt’s FUNKSTEPPA project, where the versatile improvising string bassist and Evan Parker associate returned to his funk roots. In total contrast, he performed in a magical concert at St Wenceslas’s Church, where a large town audience enjoyed a challenging programme. Eckhardt played pieces from his austerely focused but highly virtuosic Xylobiont (PSI). Two versions of Galina Ustvolskaya’s Symphony No 4 bookended the concert’s first half, her stentorian voice plumbing emotional depths over a short span.
Chamber music featured strongly in the festival. Bratislava’s Quasars Ensemble gave a rare performance of Gérard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum, the penultimate work before his early death. The French spectralist is now – to quote Quentin Tarantino about a leading actor – at the zenith of his iconicness.
Michael J Schumacher presented the latest installation in his series of Room Pieces. Other highlights included a three hour Phill Niblock performance-environment at Vitkovice Steel Hall No 6; Hana Kotková’s luminous interpretation of Wolfgang Rihm’s violin concerto Gesungene Zeit (Time Chant); and performances by New Music baritone Thomas Buckner and pianist Joe Kubera. Student works that stood out included highly original pieces by Gregory Emfietzis (How To… Corrupt Someone), Nomi Epstein, Cassandra Miller and Michael Winters. This was a densely packed festival of consistently high quality music.
- Andy Hamilton
Info
ZpětOstravské dny » Ohlasy v médiích
30.10.2009
Ostrava Days 2009
The Wire





