Dresdener Tage des Zeitgenossisches Musik Festival in October, 2004

by Anton Rovner

From September 30 to October 10 the 18th festival Dresdener Tage des Zeitgenossisches Musik took place in Dresden, Germany. The festival presented a broad and vibrant panorama of styles and trends of contemporary music of Germany and many other countries. Since each year the festival presents a special topic for presenting specific categories of music, this year's main topic of the festival was the music of composers from Eastern Europe. Consequently, a large quantity of music presented was by Eastern European composers, although German composers and those from other countries also received a fair share of representation.

The festival opened with a performance of four short operas, namely Benjamin Schweitzer's “Informationen uber Bertleby” a short opera in 11 scenes, based on subject matter from Herman Melville, Michael Hirsch's “La Didone Abbandonata” a “music drama” composed to the libretto of Pietro Metastasio, Charlotte Seither's “Sieh die Sohn” a “one woman opera” based on texts by Christine Lemke-Matwey and Johann Scheffer and Russian composer Tamara Ibragimowa's “Der Kuberreiter” based on a short story by Franz Kafka. The operas had about one to three singers each and the instrumental parts were performed by Ensemble Courage. The interesting aspect of the performance was that the operas were performed simultaneously, with the individual scenes of the operas spliced up among each other, each respective scene of each individual opera successively following the respective scene of the following opera. This provided for a vibrant modernistic effect, which was very effective and matched the brilliant innovative musical languages of the operas themselves.

A very intriguing performance was that of Alea Ensemble of contemporary music from Macedonia, which presented compositions by four Macedonian composers - Tomislav Zografski's Concert Pieces for solo bassoon, of which this was the German premiere, Jana Andreevska's “Elective Affinities” for piano, violin, viola, vibraphone and clarinet, Soni Petrovski's “Bric-a-Brac” for solo violin, a world premiere of Alexander Wegendristel's “Lear Ear” for soprano, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and viola and esteemed older-generation composer Vlastimir Nikolovski's “Trio sonoro” for clarinet, viola, piano and percussion, and French composer Francois Sarhan's “Von d'r Wilge Bis Zum Gra=ab”. Most of this music organically combined a sense of refined, broad textural palette with certain ethnic exoticisms derived from Balkan music. Especially noteworthy was Goce Kolarovski's “Four Snowy Blinks” for soprano and piano, marked with an intricate expressivity and exquisite tone color.

A very unusual concert for the festival was a concert of the “New Jewish School”, held at Dresden 's Synagogue, its chief distinction from most of the festival's programs was that it presented music from the early part of the 20 th century, rather than contemporary music. It featured the Jewish compositional school from Moscow and St. Petersburg, featuring Jewish composers, who had lived in Russia, but also including German-Jewish Victor Ulmann's three compositions for voice and piano on texts in Yiddish: “Berjoskele”, “Margarithelech” and “A mejdel in die johren”, as well as Maurice Ravel's “Kaddish”. Among the Russian Jewish composers, most impressive were pieces by Alexander Krein, Moshe Milner, Alexander Veprik and Lazare Saminsky. Most of this music was for traditional ensembles, such as piano solo, violin and piano and voice and piano. It was generally in the late Romantic tradition, entirely tonal and traditional in texture, and its main distinction was the exquisitely exotic Jewish melodies with their distinctly refined modalities, not to mention some purely exotic solutions, realized by the composers in the textural sounding of the instrumental and vocal ensembles. Many of the Russian-based composers had been pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov, who at that time had expressed his hope that a Jewish Glinka would emerge among these composers, who would give Jewish music an individual national character of its own. Most remarkable was Moshe Milner's “Mutter und Kind” (Mother and Child”, a vocal suite set on texts by J.L. Perez, Alexander Krein's Two Hebrew Songs for soprano and piano, “Ornament” (from his Three Songs without Words) and Caprice Hebraique for Violin and Piano, a traditional chant from Jewish music from the time of the Byzantine empire, set for voice and violin, Lazare Saminsky's Little Rhapsode on Two Jewish Folk Themes for violin and piano, Marc Lavry's “Sher” a Jewish Wedding Dance for violin and piano, Joel Engel's “Freilech's” for violin and piano and Alexander Veprik's “Kaddish”, Poem for violin and piano, and two sets of Two Hebrew Songs for voice and piano. The concert program was performed by soprano Franziska Dillner, violinist Ovidiu Simbotin and pianist Stefan Eder, the latter being a great enthusiast and promoter of early 20 th century Jewish music, who had devoted a lot of time to research and dissemination of this music in numerous concerts throughout Germany.

The evening of the same day presented the Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music, albeit in a reduced form of five musicians from the ensemble, who presented a program of young Russian composers. Dmitri Kourliandsky's “#(:%PER4Musicians” featured a lot of extravagant radical sounds, extracted from extended techniques for the instruments, out of which the solo cello part stood out prominently. Yuri Kasparov's “Reminiscence for Piano and 'Piano'” was performed in a brilliant and masterful manner by esteemed pianist Mikhail Dubov, who played the piano part in a virtuosic and expressive manner, presenting it in due contrast to the electronic part, which was essentially a prior recording of piano playing, processed through MIDI. Vladimir Tarnopolsky's “Echoes of the passing day” for clarinet, cello and piano was an extensive piece with a thorough development, including long, static lines, radical extended techniques, quotations from Beethoven's “Fur Elise” and a text from James Joyce spoken by the musicians at he end. Marina Voinova's “Words in Silence” for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano was a very impressive piece with very exquisite, elaborate textures and delicate expressive means. Uzbekistan based Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky's “A-S-C-H” for five instruments featured static harmonies, which were sometimes almost tonal and, presumably, utilized the notes, depicted by the letters of the abbreviation (of Schoenberg or Schnittke) spelled out in the title. The harmonies were greatly vivified by the colorful textural interplay of the instruments.

Moscow based organist Marianna Vysotskaya presented a very impressive concert of organ music the next day, titled as “Organ music from Russia, Azerbaijan and the Ukraine ”. The choice of pieces and her performance of them, presented on the program, created a very austere, enlightening, almost religious mood, entirely appropriate for the hall of the famous Dreikonigskirche and, likewise as a result of the successful order of the pieces on the program, seemed to create one giant diverse mega-composition with a meaningful “development”, created out of the succession of these compositions.

Jelal Abassov's “Postlidio in Memoriam Kara Karayev” was a meditative, plaintive piece with strong diatonic elements, short phrases of sparse diatonic notes played pointillistically, but together one after the other, adding up to chords, as well as a recognizable melody in upper voice, which created an impression of religious chorale. Later in the piece, repetitive quasi-minimalist sequential patterns in the right hand with held long notes in left hand gradually swelled to a loud climax.

Ukrainian Vladimir Runchak's “Two Confessions” consisted of two movements, titled “In the Berlin Dom” and “In the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Church”, which contained elaborate counterpoint and extended diatonicism in the harmony. The first movement was a busy polyphonic piece, combining long cantus firmus lines with quick, busy figurations, the latter bringing in dynamic momentum, while the second movement was slower with longer polyphonic lines, sustained notes, piling up on top of each other into clusters and some standard “melody and accompaniment” textures.

Alfred Schnittke's “Zwei Kleine Studien” featured a first slow piece with a meditative, austere mood and long held notes in contrast to quick-sounding repetitive phases of shorter note values, presented more for coloristic effects rather than for any dynamic addition; this was followed by an even slower second piece with sustained chords.

Dmitri Smirnov's “Diptych”, consisting of two movements “Los” and “Enitharmon,” featured long, sustained sounds, gradually accumulating from isolated notes into chords, combined with an awkward sense of polyphony and a very vague vertical sense of chromatic harmonies with a lot of tertial elements, albeit treated in a dissonant manner, as well as a few monophonic passages.

Victor Ekimovsky's “Prelude and Fugue” was a provocative, theatrically conceptual piece, typical of the composer. The Prelude featured loud, abrupt, dissonant chords, which, nonetheless, were centered on a D minor tonality, while the Fugue, conceptually a very amusing piece, since its “subjects” were single sustained notes, which was, essentially, all that the piece consisted of, and which it manipulated in a pointilistic manner, nonetheless, had a very introversive, philosophical, almost religious mood - the combination of the silly and the sublime gave this piece a distinctly individual character.

“Passacaglia” by St. Petersburg composer Alexander Knaifel was a slow, solemn, austere piece with a unified introversive mood, nonetheless, containing various eclectically contrasting sections with both homophonic and polyphonic textures, as well as stylistic allusions to styles of past epochs, such as the Renaissance and Baroque styles.

The program finished with Aizerbaijan born and Moscow based Faradj Karayev's “Postludium X” for organ, campanelli and vibraphone, a meditative, introversive piece, starting with long, sustained notes, sounding in conjunction with repeated short, staccato notes. The campanelli and vibraphone contained long, extended notes, quite homogenous to the organ's static texture, yet adding some contrasting exotic timbre. In the middle of the piece the vibraphone presented faster and livelier types of repetitive textures before the piece returned to the initial calm mood toward the end, bringing the entire program to a successful and integral conclusion.

The following day, October 5, featured a scenic sound installation by Tetsuo Furudate, titled “The Voice of Lady Madeline Usher”, based on Edgar Alan Poe's famous story “The Fall of the House of Usher”. It was very much a takeoff of a similar installation by the same composer, presented the previous year at this festival, titled “The Auditory Sense of Roderick Usher”. Unlike the previous year's performance, in which all the chairs were taken away from the hall, which was turned into the scene of the installation, in this year's performance the chairs remained in the hall, especially since in this instance a smaller hall was used for the installation. The composer, who was present in the hall, maintaining the electronic and computer equipment, presented himself as a very theatrical, bohemian figure with his long hair, drinking out of a glass and smoking a cigarette, demonstrating how relaxed and easy-going he was. The music of this installation essentially resembled a variety of factory or machine background noises, layering on top of one another, presented at various volumes. A female reader read fragments of texts from Poe's short story in both English and German. After a while, just like in last year's performance, the music started getting very loud and the wise audience members gradually started leaving the hall in order to “listen to” this music at a safe distance without getting totally deafened by the noise. The radical experiments with the volume were even more dangerous to sensitive ears than in last year's performance, where at least they came in a gradual crescendo. Here the extremely loud volume was frequently turned on very suddenly, making this year's auditory experience even more nerve racking, albeit the intent of these experiments were meant to depict the horror in Usher's soul, nonetheless, they were quite capable of evoking a sense of horror on the part of the audience members on a purely physical level, bringing out the expressionistic concept of carrying the extreme emotional impact of the story's plot onto the listener out on a purely physiological level. Although presenting the same type of sound installation as that of the previous year might have been a poor idea on the part of the festival's organizers, one chief justifiable aspect of this continuation was for the visitors of the two festivals in a row was to hear the development of last year's sound installation in this year's version, thus presenting an ongoing artistic experience, lasting for an entire year - at least, this aspect of the two installations was very effective.

October 6 presented a multimedia project, titled as “Pass_Port” for four composers, six musicians, Electronic, Space and Video. It was a joint collaboration of two German composers: Sascha Lino Lemke and Alan Fabian, and two Eastern European composers Darija Andovska from Macedonia and Svetlana Azarova from Odessa, Ukraine. It was a multimedia project, which included musical numbers of instrumental music and interludes of electronic music, various sections of which were written by each of the four composers respectively. It also presented visual effects, namely graphics on a screen of a rather sparse, geometric nature. The individual musical numbers were separated by either short ten second pauses or by interludes of electronic music by the same composers. The more impressive numbers were those by Darija Andovska and Svetlana Azarova, which were marked by strong individuality and brilliant instrumental colors. Especially memorable was the very first piece of the project, written by Andovska, very brilliantly orchestrated, spirited and temperamental in mood with lots of percussion effects and thick, dramatically sounding instrumental sound blocks, as well as both and intensive and sparsely sounding notes, where different solo instruments (most strikingly the flutes) are very prominent. Though each piece was written by the composers separately, without knowing what any of the other composers was doing, nonetheless, the overall concert presented an effect of one giant composition, written and well thought-out by one composer and artist.

October 7 presented a theatrical performance of three pieces by German composers, involving music in conjunction with choreography and elements of theater. It was titled “Music as Construction for a United Europe”. It started with “Europa” by Hartmut Dorschner, which was a piece for string ensemble, in which the players stood on stage in long lines in the form of three sides of a square. There was a video projection on the stage wall, presenting movement of clouds over water as seen from an airplane above: clearly denoting a “cosmic” element. The music was a modern, cerebral type with a strong deconstructivistic slant, featuring advanced sound effects with a lot of unusual sounds, created by means of extended techniques. Nonetheless, there were a lot of allusions to tonality or tonal centricity, including occasional quotations from various well-known melodies, among them Bethoven's “Ode to Joy” and the national anthem of Poland. Despite the ambiguity of the artistic message of the work, it was an impressive composition and, overall, produced a favorable effect.

Benjamin Schweitzer's “anordnen / verschieben” (ordering / moving around), presented with choreography by Martin Nachbar, featured three dancers - two man and one woman - performing abstract, modern dance, slightly resembling improvisations on stage. The music, performed by an ensemble of flute, trumpet, cello, double bass and percussion, was disjunctively sounding, modernistic and quite cerebral, though it possessed a very colorful, theatrical quality. It emphasized the disjunctive quality of the ensemble and made the most of the soloistic capacity of the instruments and displayed a very colorful usage of extended techniques. The artistic message of the work was, likewise, rather ambiguous, however it still produced a rather saturating and pleasing effect.

“EU-R-Oper” by Agnes Ponizil featured six singers in white clothes, resembling white chess figures, and six instrumentalists on stage, dressed as black chess figures. These twelve figures were impersonating various aspects of Europe, different European nationalities and, simultaneously, depicting different forms of artistic activity. The instruments in the ensemble were: flute, cornet (with the same player playing on the trumpet), cello, double bass and percussion. This was a very colorful and impressive performance, clearly the most satisfactory work on the program. It featured choreography and elements of opera, in which the black and white chess figures sang, played and danced choreographed lines, describing, among other things, the various trends of Europe 's musical activity. The music freely intermingled tonal and atonal harmonic elements, generously quoting from 18 th and 19 th century operatic arias as well as early 20 th century German popular songs. The aim of this composition was, clearly, to present a celebration of a unified and diverse Europe, though it might have also been meant to be a panegyric to the European Union per se.

On October 9 there was a concert of the Aleph Ensemble from France, featuring music by young composers, who were the winners of the Third International Forum for Young Composers. The ensemble performed in a most vibrant and impressive manner a large and varied program of pieces by young composers, all of which were marked with a great amount of technical and musical maturity, a masterful usage of the varied colors and textures of the instrumental ensemble, imaginative innovation of musical language and very moving expressive means. This was one of the most impressive concerts of the festival.

“Ro mahki nu ro yohnite” for voice, clarinet, trumpet, accordion, violin, cello, piano and percussion by Gabriel Pareyon from Mexico featured broad sounds, which entered alternately and layered one on top of the other, producing a continuously developing colorful textural palette with strong descriptive and pictorial qualities, among which the soprano part was especially theatrical and descriptive, its text being alternately in French, Spanish and the language of one of the Mexican Indian tribe and conveying a philosophical meaning. In this piece some of the instrumentalists alternated with other ones, the pianist playing the accordion at a certain point, while the percussionist sitting down to play at the piano. The music semantically depicted images of Central American Indian culture.

“Musique qui sent la table et la pantoufle” for voice, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion by Mayke Nas from the Netherlands was a very short, aphoristic piece, which started out and ended with very soft, sparse, percussive effects, in the middle of which came by short, sporadic passages with the other instruments, most notably the prepared piano, trumpet and soprano.

“Epitaphe” for voice, clarinet, didgeridoo, violin, cello, piano and percussion by Valery Voronov of Russia started with soft, sparse and texturally delicate music, which presented a combination of long pointillistic instrumental lines and colorful sonoristic textural blend, over which the soprano sang virtuosic passages in an expressive and colorful manner, presenting a setting of an extract from Plotinus' Second Ennead. Towards the end of the piece the music became more dynamic and extroversive, though carried out the same aims as those set in the beginning of the piece.

“Nachtlied - Fragmente” for voice, clarinet, trumpet, violin and cello by Carlo Forlivesi from Italy was a subdued, mysterious piece, where the soprano and instruments presented sparse, delicate passages in a very soft dynamic, with only occasional delves into mezzo-forte, and combined the pointillistic and the sonoristic textural approaches. Occasionally there were short outbursts of more grotesque sounds amid a generally refined textural sound world.

“De Ignoto Cantu” for trumpet, violin, cello, percussion and CD by Javier Torres Maldonaldo from Mexico was a very expressive and colorful piece with refined instrumental textural usage, added to which was a limited amount of electronic sounds, enhancing the broad sound world even further. The piece had strong pictorial qualities, seeming to depict a lot of extra-musical subjects, many of which came to mind in an associative manner during the course of listening to the piece. After starting in a moderately subdued manner, the piece gained momentum and became more dynamic in the middle before returning back to a soft, mysterious mood, which, nonetheless was in itself just as varied and descriptive as the loud section in the middle.

“Colloquial Speech” for voice, clarinet, trumpet, accordion, violin, cello, piano and percussion by Adina Dumitrescu from Romania was an expressive piece with a mysterious aura, in which the accordion and the soprano stood out among the total blend of the ensemble, in which all the instruments blended into a dramatically heterogenous ensemble. The juxtaposition of the introversive and the extroversive played a crucial role in this piece, so short, isolated sounds, as well as quickly moving passages, presenting dynamic forward-going motion fitted together very appropriately with longer, broadly held, static chords, mingling together the seemingly unmerging static and dynamic sound worlds.

“Casi Cerca” for voice, trumpet, violin, cello, piano and percussion by Cecilia Arditto from Argentina was a very soft, subdued piece with intricate, delicate textures, frequently fading in and out first on one note and then on one chord, creating a very richly refined textural sound work and an introversive, impressionistic mood. The soprano, which entered a while later in the piece did not stand out as a soloist, but presented herself as one of the elements of the textural blend ensemble, on an equal footing with the others, whereas the trumpet had a bit more prominence in the ensemble, though its dynamic rarely exceeded a mezzo-piano.

American composer Amy Williams Sextet' for clarinet, trumpet, violin, cello, piano and percussion started out with a dramatic, robust sounding instrumental tutti, to which the music returned at regular intervals, which alternated with more soft, subdued and very hesitant sounding music, this alternation presenting the innovative original form of the piece, in which a vibrantly colorful instrumental usage permeated throughout.

Sebastian Beranger, France “Gymel” for clarinet, trumpet, violin, cello, piano and percussion was a dynamic composition with sporadic colorful dramatic instrumental outbursts, interspersed with more subdued passages and tactful pauses, all of which did not diminish the piece's momentum, but, rather enhanced it in their way. The piece made extended usage of the timbral possibilities of the instrumental ensemble, blending the instruments in lively interplay and utilizing the individual possibilities of each one of them in a tasteful manner. A few markedly soloistic passages for some instruments, most notably the violin, brought additional lively variety.

“Assieds-toi Mariette” for voice, clarinet, trumpet, violin, cello, piano and percussion by Artur Kroschel from Poland featured subtle, delicately expressive instrumental effects, rather disunited with each other and creating a mysterious, introversive mood, interspersed among which were harsher sounding dramatic outbursts by the instruments, as well as isolated short solos by certain instruments, most notably the trumpet. The end of the piece had a more coherent, dynamic ensemble, crowned with dramatic vocalizations by the soprano on a limited high register.

The concert closed off with “Pas d'action” clarinet, alphorn, violin, cello, piano and percussion by young Russian composer Dmitry Kourliandsky, which involved a lot of radically innovative, grotesque-sounding textures, including a lot of percussive effects on the percussion instruments and the piano and on the string instruments, created by extended techniques, growling fluttertonguing in the low registers of the alphorn and the clarinet, not to mention eerie harmonic effects on the strings, all of which created an effective composition, which depicted the emotional moods of mystery and suspense. The harmonic and textural idiom had a bit of monotony to it, but this was consciously used, with a justified purpose of depicting the moods involved.

The final concert of the festival featured music by Chinese composers for piano as well as for exotic Chinese instruments, performed by Xu Fengxia on the zheng and the other instruments and Pi-Hsien Chen on the piano. The program started with Chou Wen Chung's piano piece “The Willows are New,” a dynamic, expressive piece, which featured melodic motion in Chinese pentatonic mode over chromatic and atonal harmonies, sometimes bordering on minor tonality, all o which resulted in very impressive music.

Xiaoyong Chen's “Crossing and Floating Point” from Diary II for piano was a very impressive piece, being lyrical, sonoristic and meditative in mood and containing atonal harmonies and modernist textures, including arpeggiated motion and repetitive sonoristic chords.

Tan Dun “C-A-G-E” for bawu and guzheng presented imaginative, intricate timbral work, combining elements of modernist and Chinese folk music timbres. This was most impressively brought out in the part of the mouth organ, which sounded similarly to an accordion.

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer “Herbststuck II” for sheng and guzheng was a successful immersion of this notable German composer intothe realm of Chinese musical culture. It had very sparse and intricate exotic timbral interplay with minimal change of pitch, the latter chiefly brought out by the overtone series on the string instrument and some exotic whistling sounds on the mouth organ. Later in the piece, there was a greater amount of pitch change, notably a development of the pentatonic scale, treated in conjunction with very intricate textural usage.

“Kalter stummer Mond for sheng and guzheng by Wu Wei and Xu-Fengxia was a very exotic piece with very mysterious sounds. Here the musicians played scraping noises on bowed instruments, including overtone series, which was followed by more rhythmically marked music. One of the players, a woman, also vocalized during her performance, first singing short sounds, and then longer intricately sounding passages, all of which resulted in a very exotically impressive composition.

Chao Ching-Wen's “In an Instant” for piano had an introversive, philosophical mood and, at the same time, a matter-of-fact quality as well as intricate yet sturdy textures, at times becoming more thick and robust. This mainly atonal piece had some elements of diatonicism in it, which possibly might have been quotations from folk music.

Lee Tzyy-Sheng's “Se III” for piano started with fast, regular, motor rhythms with some off-beat accents and an almost neo-classical sound, then finished off with sparse, lyrical sounds and linear motion. The piece was harmonically atonal with some tonal centricity in a few sections.

Zhou Long “Wu Kui” for piano was an elaborately textured work with sparse, intricate chords and arpeggiated figurations and atonal harmonies with some hints of tonal melodicism.

The festival also included a conference, the main topic of which was “Cultural Identity”. It featured a variety of speakers from various German cities and countries, among which most notable were presentations Dresden-based composer Udo Zimermann, Dresden-based musician Stefan Eder, who spoke about the phenomenon of identity in Jewis music, as well as Czech musicologist Marek Kopelent. The festival also featured presentations of Russian musicologist Stepan Naumovitch, currently residing in Dresden, Ukrainian musicologist Yuri Semenov from Odessa and Macedonian composer Goce Kolarovski, the latter having made a presentation of his music, showing various compositions for piano, chamber ensembles and orchestra, which featured a successful blend as well as alternation between modernist aesthetics, distinguished by innovative and refined textural usage and some limited amount of tonality and neo-classicism, occasionally derived from elements of Macedonian folk and church music.

All of this made the 18 th Dresdener Tage der zeitgenossischen Musik festival into a successful endeavor and a brilliant platform for various trends and styles of contemporary music, with which a lot of the participants and audience members were very pleased.