Events & Tickets
Orchestra Concert
Sounds of the Times: Songs of Hope
New World Center, Michael Tilson Thomas Performance Hall
Program
German conductor Matthias Pintscher returns to Miami Beach to present works by his native land’s composers. Operatic master Bernd Alois Zimmermann lets the cello sing in his Song of Hope, performed by NWS’s own Cello Fellow Ben Fryxell, a winner of NWS’s Concerto Competition. In Schreiben, Helmut Lachenmann operates the orchestra as a writer that sometimes whispers and at other times screams. This concert includes the world premiere of a new work—Orun—by Brazilian innovator Marcos Balter, whose works are rooted in hyper-dramatization of live performance.
Program
Marcos Balter
(b. 1974)
Approx. Duration: 8 minutes
Orun
(2022; world premiere of NWS commission)
Bernd Alois Zimmermann
(1918-1970)
Approx. Duration: 17 minutes
Canto di Speranza (Song of Hope): Cantata for Cello and Orchestra
(1952; revised 1957)
Mr. Fryxell
Intermission
Helmut Lachenmann
(b. 1935)
Approx. Duration: 27 minutes
Schreiben
(2003)
Marcos Balter
Orun
(2022; world premiere of NWS commission)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes
After studying piano and composition in his native Rio de Janeiro, Marcos Balter moved to the United States for postgraduate studies at Texas Christian University and Northwestern University. His “whimsical” and “surreal” scores (to quote The New York Times) have made Balter a fixture of the new music community in his adopted home of New York City, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Tanglewood Music Center among others have elevated him to the top tier of contemporary composers.
Mr. Balter provided the following program note:
Central to the understanding of lifecycles in Ìṣẹ̀ṣe, the Yoruba religion, are the concepts of family and ancestralism. Orun is the invisible dimension where disembodied spirits join their ancestors after their journey in the Ayé (the physical existence). It is at Orun that ancestral wisdom is expanded and empowered, absorbing knowledge gained by the previous physical existences of each family member. This collective ancestral force resides in Ikole Orun, which is commonly associated with the idea of heaven in Christian religions, though not exactly the same. A portion of that ancestral essence might be assigned as the consciousness of a living being (Ori), usually within that same ancestral bloodline (Atunwa), guiding that person towards fulfilling their destiny in the llé Ayé, the place where life occurs. Orun points towards connectivity and family wisdom. It is both an origin and a destination, the source of our ancestral strength and where the best of our essence will someday empower those who come after us.
Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Canto di Speranza (Song of Hope): Cantata for Cello and Orchestra
(1952; revised 1957)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes
In 1948, after completing his studies in Cologne, Bernd Alois Zimmermann attended the third annual summer courses in Darmstadt, Germany, a growing hotbed of avant-garde style. Zimmerman was a bit older than the biggest stars who emerged from that scene, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and unlike those fierce idealogues, Zimmerman took a more nuanced view of serial composition and the dissolution of Classical-Romantic style.
The single-movement cello concerto that Zimmerman composed between 1953 and 1957 shows off this approach that applied new combinations of pitches to the established concerto discourse of a soloist playing off an orchestra. This “Song of Hope” is not exactly filled with sunshine, but its emotional honesty and vulnerability are their own forms of hope, as told by a fatalistic witness to one of history’s darkest chapters—a man who would end up taking his own life.
Helmut Lachenmann
Schreiben
(2003)
Approximate duration: 27 minutes
For Helmut Lachenmann, like so many others in the European avant-garde, summers spent at the Darmstadt courses for new music opened his ears to new approaches. Following further studies in Italy with composer Luigi Nono, he returned to Germany where began teaching and continued composing. In the 1940s and -50s Lachenmann developed a personal approach to sound that he called musique concrète instrumentale, in which ordinary sounds captured on tape recordings were contextualized and presented as musical material. Lachenmann became interested in using musical instruments and the art of performance to create a style that was free from the primacy of pitch collections. The result is a style, as he explains it, “in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves. Consequently, those qualities, such as timbre, volume, etc., do not produce sounds for their own sake, but describe or denote the concrete situation: listening, you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered.”
In Schreiben (German for “writing”), composed in 2003 and revised the next year, Lachenmann took the physical act of writing as a point of departure for a long and astounding arc of orchestral sound. He explained, “Those who write the German word “Schreiben” [writing] also unavoidably write the word “Schrei” [scream], as well as the word “reiben” [to rub, as when causing friction]. The second word seems every bit as neutral/practical as the first would seem emotional. And both of these aspects, along with the contrast between them, characterize my piece.”
– © 2022 Aaron Grad
Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.
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Matthias Pintscher, conductor
The 2022-23 season is Matthias Pintscher’s final season as Music Director of the Ensemble intercontemporain (EI), the world’s foremost contemporary music ensemble, founded in 1980 by Pierre Boulez and winner of the 2022 Polar Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in music.
In his most successful decade-long artistic leadership of EIC, he continued and expanded the cultivation of new work by emerging composers of the 21st century, alongside performances of iconic works by the pillars of the avant-garde of the 20th Century. In this, his valedictory season, Mr. Pintscher has a robust season of concerts in Paris including collaborations with the Conservatoire de Paris and IRCAM, operas-in-concert and tours throughout Europe and the United States, including performances in Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall.
As a conductor, Mr. Pintscher enjoys and maintains relationships with several of the world’s most distinguished orchestras, among them the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and BBC Scottish Symphony. He is also Creative Partner for the Cincinnati Symphony. As guest conductor in Europe, he makes debut appearances this season with the Wiener Symphoniker and Gurzenich Orchester of Cologne, and returns to the Royal Concertgebouw, BRSO, BBC Scottish SO, Barcelona Symphony and Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble. In North America, he will make prominent debuts with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kansas City Symphony, in addition to regular visits to Cincinnati Symphony, and repeat guest engagements with
the Detroit Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic and New World Symphony. Mr. Pintscher has also conducted several opera productions for the Berliner Staatsoper (Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee, Wagner’s Lohengrin), Wiener Staatsoper (Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando) and the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. He returns to the Berliner Staatsoper in 2023 for Der Fliegende Holländer.
Mr. Pintscher is well known as a composer, and his works appear frequently on the programs of major symphony orchestras throughout the world. In 2021 he was the focus of the Suntory Hall Summer Festival—a weeklong celebration of his works with the Tokyo Symphony, as well as a residency by the EIC with symphonic and chamber music performances. His third violin concerto, Assonanza, written for Leila Josefowicz, was premiered in January 2022 with the Cincinnati Symphony. Another 2021-22 world premiere was neharot, a co-commission of Suntory Hall, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Staatskapelle Dresden, where he was named Capell-Compositeur. In the 2016-17 season, he was the inaugural composer-in-residence of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and from 2014 to 2017, he was artist-in-residence at the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Pintscher began his musical training in conducting, studying with Pierre Boulez and Péter Eötvös in his early twenties, when composing soon took a more prominent role in his life. He rapidly gained critical acclaim in both areas of activity and continues to compose in addition to his conducting career. A prolific composer, Mr. Pintscher's music is championed by some of today's finest performing artists, orchestras and conductors. His works have been performed by such orchestras as the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris, among many others. He is published exclusively by Barenreiter, and recordings of his works can be found on Kairos, EMI, Teldec, Wergo, and Winter & Winter.
Ben Fryxell, Cello Fellow
Ben Fryxell is a cellist from Cincinnati and a second-year Fellow at the New World Symphony. Since his teenage years, he has been a regular presence on the concert stage. He has performed as a soloist with the Kentucky Symphony, Blue Ash-Montgomery Symphony, and the combined forces of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra, as well as many others.
Mr. Fryxell is passionate about music from all eras, but especially enjoys studying Baroque music and its cultural influences, as well as current trends in concert music. He received his master of music degree from the New England Conservatory in 2019, where he studied with Yeesun Kim, and his bachelor of music degree from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Natasha Brofsky. He has also studied with Alice Ann O’Neill and Alan Rafferty, and has studied chamber music with members of the Juilliard, Borromeo and Emerson string quartets, as well as Emanuel Ax, Norman Fischer and countless others.
During his time with the New World Symphony, Mr. Fryxell hopes to not only hone his orchestral playing skills, but also to tap into his innate entrepreneurial spirit to find creative ways to bring music to the public. When he is not at the cello, he enjoys composing, watching stand-up comedy and studying languages.
