Category: News

Su 10.3.2019 at 19 Tampere-talo

The main event of theKaija Saariaho Village in Tampere Hall in March will be the Finnish premiere of the ensemble version of Saariaho’s masterful oratorio La Passion de Simone.

La Passion de Simone is based on the life and ideas of the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), who impressed Saariaho as a teenager. The fifteen-station oratorio is inspired by the fourteen stops on Jesus’ Way of the Cross, the fifteenth being the end of the journey.

The work features Saariaho’s trusted orchestra Avanti! and the Paris-based musical theatre group La Chambre aux echos. The vocal soloist is Japanese soprano Sayuri Araida and the actress is French actress Isabelle Seleskovitch. The conductor is Clément Mao-Takacs and the stage director is Aleksi Barrière.

Read more about the concert on the Tampere Hall website.

Basic ticket 44/38 €, pensioners 40/34 €, students and children 20 €

Tickets on sale at Lippupiste.

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

Eila Nevalainen has been elected as the new President of Avant Chamber Orchestra for 2019-2020. Previously the press officer of President Tarja Halonen and spokesperson for European Commissioner Erkki Liikanen, among others, Nevalainen has been a member of the Pro Avanti! Association since last summer. “I am genuinely excited about this opportunity,” said Mr Nevalainen, adding, “I like a lot of contemporary music and it is therefore a particular honour to be involved in the Avant Chamber Orchestra, which plays a lot of music of our time.”

Timo Ahtinen, Avant’s musician and double bassist, who has been the chairman since April 2018, is leaving Pro Avanti! Association at his own request and will continue as Vice-Chairman.

Pro Avanti! The Board of Directors of Pro Avanti Association also includes Emilie Gardberg, Antti Räikkönen, Tom von Weymarn, Kaija Saariaho, Valtteri Malmivirta, Heljä Räty and Antti Suoranta. Hanna Juutilainen and Mikko Ivars are alternate members.

Kari Kriikku will continue to serve as Avant’s Artistic Director and Annika Mustonen as Executive Director.

Avanti! will next perform in public at the Musica nova festival on 10 February 2019 in Sonore Hall of Helsinki Music Centre. Further information here.

Fri 9.11.2018 at 19 Temppeliaukio Church

The annual Nordic Music Days will be held again this year in Helsinki. As usual, the festival presents a wide range of contemporary Nordic music. This year’s theme extends a geographical handshake to Scotland, as Avant’s Forward! concert will feature the Clarinet Concerto by Scottish composer Helen Grime, with Lauri Sallinen as soloist. The chamber opera Traum, composed by Swedish composer Magnus Bunnskog, features soprano Mia Heikkinen and baritone Joonas Asikainen as soloists. The concert will be conducted by Anna-Maria Helsing.

The Forward! concert is the second part of a two-concert series on Friday evening, the first of which will feature the Zagros Ensemble in the Shadows of Silence.

Avanti!
Anna-Maria Helsing, conductor
Lauri Sallinen, clarinet
Mia Heikkinen, soprano
Joonas Asikainen, baritone

Farangis Nurulla-Khoja (SE): Ni d’ici-ni d’ailleurs
Bjørn Bolstad Skjelbred (NO): Wave-Chains (Liquid Reconstruction 1)
Helen Grime (SCO): Clarinet Concerto
Lars Klit (DK): Furui obakeyashi
Magnus Bunnskog (SE): Dream
Eivind Buene (NO): Sea Change

TICKETS:
22,50€ / 13,50€ (incl. service charge) Buy tickets HERE
Joint ticket to two concerts at Temppeliaukio Church
27,50€ / 17,50€ (incl. service charge) Buy joint ticket HERE

HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!! – “pandemonium for chansonnier and ensemble” (1977-79) is a cornucopia of styles, stories and characters, to which composer, conductor and singer Gruber adds his own twist of cabaret tradition. It in the groove, the composer talks about his songs and his singing.

The subtitle of Gruber’s work, “Pandemonium”, means chaos, pandemonium, why not a little pandemic, a global epidemic. The “Chansonnier” as soloist suggests that the vocal part of the work calls for something more than a trained operatic vibrato.

“Frankenstein!! is in the repertoire of many conductors, but on this planetThere are only a few singers who can perform it,” says HK Gruber, who has sung solo in countless performances of his work. “Once in America, I missed a performance because of a flight cancelled due to the weather. David Robertson, conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, shorthanded the vocal part, and his assistant jumped in to conduct. I sat in the Chicago airport waiting for the storm to pass and was told that the concert had gone well.”

In the late 60s, Gruber and a few friends formed the MOB-art & tone-ART group of artists, all of whom were actors, musicians and singers. “Even the cellist Heinrich Schiffwas part of it at the time,” Gruber says. “As a child, I sang in the Wiener Sängerknaben boys’ choir. In this group I rediscovered singing and developed my own singing style. I have always called myself a chansonnier instead of a baritone soloist.”

The right style was found in Berlin, where Gruber met the famous actor Ernst Busch (1900-1980). “Busch collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, who composed numerous protest songs. Busch, who was also an accomplished singer, practically spoke in the tune written by the composer. In this style, the r’s must roll properly and the consonants must be explosive. The vowels also need to be sharp and wide, in complete contrast to the carefully formed and placed a’s and y’s of classical singing,” Gruber says with a murmur.

Gruber himself is the only one who both leads and sings his hit song. “There are surprises and theatrical elements, which are supported by performing in both roles.”

Songs by Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler

“I was introduced toKurt Weill’s symphonies in the early 1960s. At that time, his output was known, of course, for the Three Penny Opera, but not much was known about his symphonies.” Gruber says. An early recording of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany led Gruber not only to Weill’s symphonic expression, but also to clear and articulate singers. “Despite the stripped-down and simple style, the composer’s bright intelligence remains.”

Arnold Schoenberg taught Hanns Eisler, who was extremely poor but considered the most talented of his students, for free. “Eisler, of course, also learned the 12-tone technique and in 1924 was the first composer to write a work using this technique.” Eisler moved to Berlin in 1927, where he met Bertolt Brecht. “Both were political leftists and sought to influence the political climate created by the rise of National Socialism through art. Eisler composed agit-prop (agitation and propaganda) songs to Brecht’s texts, known as ” Kampfmusik “, and they were performed by Ernst Busch and others!”

Eisler composed a lot of atonal music, but his songs were very simple agit-prop songs that people sang in the streets. Schoenberg was not necessarily particularly enamoured of his pupil’s work, says Gruber: “Schoenberg declared that a composer’s only duty was to write symphonies. Eisler replied that the composer’s only duty was to do useful things.”

By 1935, the world changed irrevocably and Eisler had to flee via Denmark and Sweden to the United States, where he lived until 1947. On his return to Europe, he first settled in Vienna. “He was Austrian by birth and kept his passport even when he later lived in the GDR. The politicians there were annoyed by Eisler, who travelled relatively freely on the basis of his passport, but the composer did not seem to mind. It was in the GDR, however, that he died.”

Eisler, a left-winger, was not hired by the Vienna Music Academy for fear of losing the post-war Marshall Plan aid from the United States. “This was, of course, complete nonsense,” Gruber snorts. “Just think, if it had been otherwise, I would probably have become Eisler’s pupil!”

Of the songs chosen for the Avant concert, Gruber says: “Weill, Brecht and Eisler are my role models. They showed the importance of the text and the musical structure, which has much to offer contemporary music.”

18.10. klo 19.00

Temppeliaukion kirkko, Helsinki
Avanti!, dir & sol. HK Gruber
Kurt Weill; Hanns Eisler: Songs
Louis Andriessen: Workers Union
HK Gruber: Frankenstein!! Pan-demonium for singer and orchestra to poems by H. C. Artmann

Tickets 32/27/15 € (+ delivery charges).
Lippu.fi