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2022 Event – The Carducci Quartet with Robin Green

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Dydd Sul 25 Medi 2022

 

PEDWARAWD CARDUCCI GYDA ROBIN GREEN (PIANO)

 

2.00yp, Neuadd Cyngerdd Prifysgol Caerdydd

Programme

 

John Luther Adams
Nunataks
9’

 

Philip Glass
String Quartet No. 2 “Company”
9’

 

György Kurtág  
Selection from Játékok
10’

 

Huw Watkins
Piano Quintet
20’

 

There will be no interval at this performance.

John Luther Adams

 

For John Luther Adams, music is a lifelong search for home—an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and remember our place within the larger community of life on earth. Living for almost 40 years in northern Alaska, JLA discovered a unique musical world grounded in space, stillness, and elemental forces. In the 1970s and into the ’80s, he worked full time as an environmental activist.

 

But the time came when he felt compelled to dedicate himself entirely to music. He made this choice with the belief that, ultimately, music can do more than politics to change the world. Since that time, he has become one of the most widely admired composers in the world, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy Award, and many other honors. In works such as Become Ocean, In the White Silence, and Canticles of the Holy Wind, Adams brings the sense of wonder that we feel outdoors into the concert hall. And in outdoor works such as Inuksuit and Sila: The Breath of the World, he employs music as a way to reclaim our connections with place, wherever we may be.

 

A deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity drives Adams to continue composing. As he puts it: “If we can imagine a culture and a society in which we each feel more deeply responsible for our own place in the world, then we just may be able to bring that culture and that society into being.”

 

Since leaving Alaska, JLA and his wife Cynthia have made their home in the deserts of Mexico, Chile, and the southwestern United States.

Nunataks

 

John Luther Adams writes:

 

Nunutaks are mountains that rise up out of icefields and glaciers. The jagged contours of nunataks contrast sharply with the smooth whiteness that surrounds them.

 

As the ice melts and the sea rises, these solitary peaks stand as stark reminders of human isolation and vulnerability.

 

Philip Glass

 

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

 

The operas – “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,” among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” while “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia.” His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously.

 

He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

 

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

 

There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty five operas, large and small; twelve symphonies, thirteen concertos; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; nine string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

 

String Quartet No. 2 “Company”

 

Philip Glass writes:

 

Company is the name of a short novel by Samuel Beckett which was adapted for the stage and performed as a monologue by Frederick Neuman. Mr Neuman had asked and received Beckett’s permission to use an original musical score which I was commissioned to compose.

 

I liked the idea of using the medium of the String Quartet that would allow for both an introspective and passionate quality well suited to the text. Beckett picked four places in the work which he referred to as the “intercices as it were”. Not surprisingly these four short movements have turned out to be a thematically cohesive work which now, as my String Quartet No.2, has taken on a life of its own.

Gyorgy Kurtág

 

Kurtág was born at Lugos (Lugoj in Romania) on 19 February 1926. From 1940 he took piano lessons from Magda Kardos and studied composition with Max Eisikovits in Timisoara. Moving to Budapest, he enrolled at the Academy of Music in 1946 where his teachers included Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas (composition), Pál Kadosa (piano) and Leó Weiner (chamber music).

 

In 1957-58 Kurtág studied in Paris with Marianne Stein and attended the courses of Messiaen and Milhaud. As a result, he rethought his ideas on composition and marked the first work he wrote after his return to Budapest, a string quartet, as his opus 1.

 

In 1958-63 Kurtág worked as a répétiteur with the Béla Bartók Music Secondary School in Budapest. In 1960-80 he was répétiteur with soloists of the National Philhamonia. From 1967 he was assistant to Pál Kadosa at the Academy of Music, and the following year he was appointed professor of chamber music. He held this post until his retirement in 1986 and subsequently continued to teach at the Academy until 1993.

 

With increased freedom of movement in the 1990s he has worked increasingly outside Hungary, as composer in residence with the Berlin Philharmonic (1993-1994), with the Vienna Konzerthaus (1995), in the Netherlands (1996-98), in Berlin again (1998-99), and a Paris residency at the invitation of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Cité de la Musique and the Festival d’Automne.

 

Kurtág won the prestigious 2006 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his ‘…concertante…’. His opera Fin de Partie, based on Samuel Beckett’s play, was premiered by La Scala Milan in 2018 and was acclaimed as his magnum opus.

Selection from Játékok

 

Játékok (Hungarian: Games) is an ongoing collection of “pedagogical performance pieces” by György Kurtág. He has been writing them since 1973 and, as of 2021, ten volumes had been published.

 

Volumes I, II, III, V, VI, VII, IX and X are for piano solo. Volumes IV and VIII are for piano 4-hands or two pianos.

 

In this performance, Robin Green will perform 6 works from these volumes:

 

  1. Perpetuum mobile
  2. Waltz
  3. Play with overtones
  4. Adoration, adoration, accursed desolation
  5. Ligatura x
  6. Voice from far away

 

Huw Watkins

 

Huw Watkins was born in Wales in 1976 and studied piano with Peter Lawson at Chetham’s School of Music and composition with Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr and Julian Anderson at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. In 2001 he was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, where he later taught composition. He currently teaches composition at the Royal Academy of Music.

 

In 2001 he was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, where he later taught composition. He currently teaches composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Watkins has written concertos for a number of high-profile soloists, including the widely acclaimed Violin Concerto (2010) for Alina Abragimova, premiered by BBC Symphony Orchestra with Edward Gardner. London Symphony Orchestra has commissioned two concertos: London Concerto (2005) and the Flute Concerto (2013) for Adam Walker, premiered under Daniel Harding in 2014. His longstanding relationship with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales has resulted in a number of works, including a Piano Concerto (2001-5) premiered in 2002 with the composer at the piano, and a Double Concerto (2004-5) premiered by Philip Dukes (viola) and Josephine Knight (cello).

 

As Composer in Association, Watkins wrote the Cello Concerto (2016) for his brother Paul Watkins, premiered at the BBC Proms under Thomas Søndergård, Spring (2017) for orchestra premiered with Ryan Wigglesworth, and The Moon for chorus and orchestra, which premieres at the 2019 Proms. In 2017, the Hallé Orchestra commissioned Watkins’ Symphony, premiered under Music Director Sir Mark Elder. 2020 began with the world premiere of Dawning for Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

PEDWARAWD LLINYNNOL CARDUCCI

 

An internationally renowned Anglo-Irish string quartet based in the UK, the versatile and award-winning Carducci String Quartet has performed everything from brand new quartets, classic works by Haydn, complete Shostakovich cycles, and even partnered with folk-rock icon Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Founded in 1997, the ensemble has won numerous international competitions, including Concert Artists Guild International Competition USA 2007 and First Prize at Finland’s Kuhmo International Chamber Music Competition 2004. In 2016, they took home a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for their performances of cycles of the complete Shostakovich Quartets. This Shostakovich15 project was accompanied by a recording of quartets 4, 8 and 11 for Signum Classics, to which the quartet added a further volume in spring 2019 (1,2 and 7) acclaimed by Gramophone Magazine for its “…athletic, upfront performances, clear in texture, forthright in tone and bold in articulation.”  The quartet has released a bevy of acclaimed recordings on their own label, Carducci Classics, as well as Signum Classics, and their Naxos recordings of Philip Glass Quartets have had over six million plays on Spotify.

Robin Green

 

“A light touch and an engaging tone” (The Strad magazine), Robin Green enjoys a busy career as a soloist, chamber musician and conductor.

 

Robin’s CD, Dialog mit Mozart released on the Gramola label, was Editor’s Choice in the Strad Magazine. His recording Games Chorales and Fantasie released on the Claves label was reviewed by Gramophone: “Green… an intelligent and sensitive musician with a genuine flair for imaginative programming.”

 

Robin regularly performs in festivals in the UK and abroad. Recent highlights include the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Interlaken Classics Festival, Davos Young Artists Festival, the International Musicians Seminar ‘Open Chamber’ Festival at Prussia Cove, the Pharos Trust, Penarth Chamber Music festival and the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier.

 

Chamber music forms a central part of Robin’s life as a musician. Former recipient of the Leverhulme Chamber music fellowship at the Royal College of Music, Robin was the first prize winner of the Royal Overseas League Chamber music competition, the Concours Nicati in Switzerland and runner up prize winner at the International Schubert duo competition. Robin is currently a member of the Odysseus Piano Trio. He has collaborated with Gordan Nikolitch, Valeryi Sokolov, Bogdan Bozovic, Christoph Richter, Christian Elliott, Catherine Manson and Alice Neary amongst others.

 

Robin is a piano professor at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. He lives in Cardiff with his wife and 2 children.

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