“Fresh off the drawing board” might be the best way to describe most of the instrumental chamber works performed at the Meitar Ensemble’s closing concert for the 2018-2019 season, which took place on June 26th 2019 in the Ran Baron Hall of the Israel Conservatory of Music, Tel Aviv. Performing alongside members of the Meitar Ensemble were students of the Tedarim Project, a two-year master’s degree program in contemporary music initiated by the Meitar Ensemble at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and attended by ten students from Israel and abroad. Founded in 2004 by artistic director Amit Dolberg and based in Tel Aviv, the Meitar Ensemble, featuring a prominent selection of virtuoso musicians, has commissioned over 200 works and performs at prestigious international venues. It has been acclaimed for its significant contribution to the development of Israeli culture and music
 |
| Moshe Aharonov,Amit Dolberg,Yoni Gotlibovich (Culiner Creative Circle) |
The Tel Aviv event opened with the three works of the final stage of the 2019 Matan Givol Competition for Composers. In memory of violinist Matan Givol, the competition, now in its fourth year and under the auspices of the Meitar Ensemble, is open to composers of all ages and from all countries. This year, over 50 scores were submitted to the competition, coming from Spain, Taiwan, Italy, Australia, China, South Korea, Romania, USA, Turkey, Austria, Hungary, Poland, England, Russia, Cyprus, Switzerland, Bosnia, Slovenia, Albania, Israel, Finland, Thailand, Japan, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Greece and Ireland. The jury, present at the Tel Aviv concert, consisted of Ayal Adler, Guy Feder, Pascal Gallois and members of the Meitar Ensemble. Taking 2nd prize, “Cinq pièges brefs” (Five Brief Snares) for piano trio by Spanish composer Mikel Urquiza (b.1988) was performed by Amit Dolberg (prepared) piano, Moshe Aharonov-violin and Yoni Gotlibovich-’cello. The players presented a finely-detailed performance of the piece’s many small individual gestures, presenting its humorous- and dancelike moments and the underlying process of the five miniatures. In South Korean composer Siho Kim’s “Sussurro” (Whispers), winning 3rd prize, the vivid, confrontational opening takes the listener into a vibrant soundscape rich in repeated gestures, weeping glissandi and homophonic moments, to conclude on a curious, whispered major chord. “Silhouette” by Piyawat Louilarpprasert (Thailand), won 1st prize, its dramatic agenda bristling with textural- and emotional contrasts, with Moshe Aharonov expounding its sizable solo with deep connectedness. The performance kept audience members at the edge of their seats.
Fabien Lévy is an international composer both in lifestyle and in his compositional œuvre. Born in Paris in 1968, he has lived in several countries, being involved in their various local music scenes. His delicate music brings together spectralism, musique concrète instrumentale and minimalism, even the music of Central Africa and of Japan. In “À propos” (2008) for flute, clarinet, violin, ‘cello and piano, each of the four movements is dedicated to one visual artist - Jeff Wall, Giuseppe Penone, Alberto Burri, and Tim Hawkinson - and has been referred to by the composer as his “little imaginary museum”. Comprising both individual- and joint utterances, moments at times pensive, haunting and static, at others, defiant, feisty, often strident, the work represents Lévy’s musical world, one ruled by rhythmical delicacy, sonic colour, sensitivity and his liking for surprise, the latter emerging as some whistled utterances. Pascal Gallois, who conducted the three larger ensemble works, held the work’s tension throughout, showing the importance of the text’s many rests.
The concert included two premieres, the first being what was titled as “New Piece for Ensemble (piano, violin, flute, ‘cello, clarinet) and Electronics” by Israeli composer Erel Paz (b.1974). Paz himself was on stage to activate the live electronics. Germinating from a pulsating octave, the piece’s sound world became gripping, its dark, bleak gestures unrelenting, with anxious utterances from the violin (Cecilia Bercovich), followed by a perplexing, somewhat otherworldly fragmented tritone-based duet between violin and looped electronics. An intense piano section gave rise to a moving flute solo, with the violin answered by the ‘cello. The piece’s second movement opened with intense, dark timbres, weighted down by bassy piano chords, relieved by a brighter, more positive piano solo, only to swing back to undulating waves of intensity, with dull, thunderous effects and punctuated by what sounded like gunshots. A sombre, powerful piece beautifully crafted, sensitive and accessible.
Israeli Omer Barash (b.1995) is the first composer to graduate from the Tedarim program, with M.Mus studies in composition under Prof. Ari Ben-Shabetai, and his B.Mus in piano under Prof. Eitan Globerson. Much of his oeuvre to date consists of chamber compositions. Completed in April 2019, “Jeux Jerusalemiens” (Jerusalem Games), its title a reference to Polish composer Lutosławski’s “Venetian Games” and written in a similar spirit, is both the final work for Barash’s studies at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and his personal farewell to Jerusalem. For his tribute to the city, Barash did not wish the piece to be sentimental or romantic. Yet, what he refers to as a “non-serious” piece expresses chaos, the “dissolving” of each utterance being his expression for how physically neglected parts of Jerusalem are, with the capital “crumbling culturally and in religious matters”, in the composer’s words. But, opening with a vibrant screen of sounds, the music itself is certainly upbeat, coloured with a florid ‘cello solo, with just a few tranquil sections but mostly consisting of staticity and strident sonorities. The work ends with the sound of the siren that signals the beginning of the sabbath in Jerusalem. As of September 2019, Omer Barash will study with Prof. Philippe Leroux at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, Montreal.
Born in 1960, French conductor Pascal Gallois, an internationally-renowned bassoonist, has been a member of Ensemble Intercontemporain, serves as director of the Mozart Conservatory (Paris) and he also hosts the Musicales of Quiberon Festival, a festival combining classical repertoire with contemporary music. He is the author of “The Techniques of Bassoon Playing”. On his first professional visit to Israel, this concert was his debut with the Meitar Ensemble. His precise, eloquent conducting made for high-quality performance and much enjoyment for all in collaboration with the outstanding and dedicated instrumentalists of the Meitar Ensemble and the Tedarim project.
 |
| Maestro Pascal Gallois (Thierry Vagne) |
No comments:
Post a Comment