Sun 10.2.2019 at 19.15 Sonore Hall, Music Hall
Avant’s season of concerts kicks off in February, when the Case Black concert invites the audience to enjoy contemporary music as part of the Musica nova Helsinki festival. Avanti! will offer an interesting selection of Canadian contemporary music from recent years, with soprano Anu Komsi as soloist and Clement Power as conductor.
Nicole Lizée (b. 1973) is a Canadian contemporary composer whose music can be described as musical science fiction. Lizée’s music is inspired by 60s psychedelia, early music videos and films by Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino. Black Midi (2016) by Avant combines an onstage string quartet with a video work. In this work, video takes on an equally essential role as music. The musicians play electronic and mechanical toys, creating a kind of TV drama full of unintentional humour. The result is an impressionistic and hallucinatory dimension.
Soprano Anu Komsi performs Claude Vivier ‘s Bouchara for soprano, chamber orchestra and tape (1981). Bouchara is, in the composer’s words, “a love song whose words are an invented language, a language of love that tells a story that keeps repeating itself”. The work is part of a series created by the composer around the theme of Marco Polo. The city of Bouchara, Uzbekistan, on the Silk Road, is linked to the journey and is included in the tape part of the work.
The title of the work by Croatian composer Mirela Ivicevic (b. 1980), Case Black, refers to the year 1943, during the Second World War, when the fascist central powers tried to defeat the Yugoslav resistance movement. The project was unsuccessful, but the fighting claimed an extraordinary amount of human lives. One of the many partisans killed in the Battle of Sutjetska was the composer’s Croatian grandfather. The composer says that his work is a response to the current political climate in Croatia, which has led the country towards extremism.
In the music of Matthew Whittall (b. 1975), a Canadian composer living in Finland, one can hear a Finnish-Canadian connection to nature, an appreciation of freedom and at the same time an experimental and direct expression. Whittall’s February concert will feature Night, sleep, death and the stars for various flutes and harp, named after Walt Whitman’s poem A clear midnight. Impressionistic and dreamlike, the work takes you to the other side of the unconscious.
Ticket prices 13/20/26 €. Tickets on sale at Ticketmaster.
Performers:
Avanti! chamber orchestra
Clement Power, conductor
Anu Komsi, soprano
Programme:
Matthew Whittall: Night, Sleep, Death and the stars (20′)
Claude Vivier: Bouchara (13′)
***
Mirela Ivicevic: Case Black (10′)
Nicole Lizée: Black Midi (25′)
Duration approx. 1h 30 min incl. intermission
