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ADMISSION: 30 Euro, advance booking 29 Euro

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NATURE IS HEAVEN___CONCERT WITH WORLD PREMIERE

WORLD CLASS MEETS WORLD PREMIERE!

Grammy award winner Paul Hillier and his ensemble Theatre of Voices will perform the composition “Behind me – dips Eternity” by Bernd Franke from Leipzig for the first time. New music, John Cage and the poems of Emily Dickinson form a unique sound experience in the 12th century church of St. Nicholas.

 

This concert is the third in a series of events exploring the connection between nature and the arts, taking as its subject the instruments of human knowledge. We started with the exhibition NACH DEN STERNEN GREIFEN, continued our work in nature with the sculpture project KLIMA.KUNST.NATUR last October and now, with the concert NATURE IS HEAVEN, we are supplementing our preoccupation with nature and our experience of nature with musical interpretation.

 

Performers

Paul Hillier

Theatre of Voices

Naomi Sato

 

Program

Oshikicho no choshi for Shō solo performed by Naomi Sato (10 minutes)

John Cage, Ryoanji performed by Theatre of Voices and Paul Hillier (35 minutes)

World premiere

Bernd Franke, BEHIND ME – DIPS ETERNITY – music for four voices and shō based on poems by Emily Dickinson and Saigyō (2023) performed by Naomi Sato and Theatre of Voices

 

Concert introduction

May 20, 2023, 6.30 pm

Prof. Bernd Franke

St. Nikolaus Bad Reichenhall Anton-Winkler-Str. 10, 83435 Bad Reichenhall

 

 

Bernd Franke on his work in the world premiere:

 

“Behind Me – dips Eternity was created at the suggestion of the director of the Bad Reichenhall Art Academy, Stefan Wimmer, and the legendary British conductor Paul Hillier, who has lived and worked in Copenhagen for many years. I have had a wonderful artistic collaboration with Paul Hillier for a long time; he has performed some of my choral works in Copenhagen, Berlin and Dublin, among other places, and invited me to Copenhagen as Composer in Residence in 2008.

I have had my eye on the texts of the great American poet Emily Dickinson, which I set to music, for a long time, and I came across the wonderful short poems of the Japanese poet Saigyo a few years ago on the recommendation of a colleague. Both cultures have inspired and influenced me for many years, since the early 90s the avant-garde of the USA such as the New York School with Cage, Feldman, Brown and Wolff, but also Ives, Ruggles, Reich, Partch and others.

Since 1998, I have been interested in Asia and Southeast Asia, its music, nature, culture and architecture and, above all, its philosophy, traveling there for several weeks every year.

Since 2010, the focus has been on Japan, and I have written several compositions for Japanese musicians and singers. (including for Shō and also for the Noh singer Ryoko Aoki)

The poet monk Saigyō lived in the 12th century and his book “Poems from the mountain hermitage” is very famous in Japan. I have coupled poems by Dickinson and Saigyo as pairs, interlocked with small interludes of the Japanese Shō, a mouth organ that also exists in China.

11 short songs for four solo voices (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) are mirrored by “mirrors” of the shō, framed, as it were, by the voice of eternity.

Eternity is an important motif and symbol in the worlds of Dickinson, but also in Saigyo’s short poems, which are often characterized by black humour, irony and sometimes bitterness towards the great and probably eternal weaknesses of human existence.

Ale’s texts are timeless and therefore always frighteningly topical.”

About the performers:

THEATRE OF VOICES is an internationally recognized Danish vocal group with almost 40 releases and several awards. Theatre of Voices’ repertoire covers a broad spectrum of genres, ranging from the earliest notated music to modern sound art installations and contemporary operas. The ensemble’s distinctive, clear sound and undivided dedication to the musical material has led to numerous collaborations with composers such as Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich, Stockhausen, John Adams, Kaija Saariaho and Liu Sola, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Helena Tulve, Sunleif Rasmussen, Galina Grigorjeva, Michael Gordon, David Lang, John Luther Adams, Line Tjørnhøj, Nigel Osborne, Arnannguaq Gerstrøm, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hildur Guðnadóttir and many others.

Theatre of Vocies has lent voices to the soundtracks of films such as the Oscar-winning La Grande Bellezza (Paolo Sorrentino), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve) and most recently the Danish film The Suicide Tourist (Jonas Alexander Arnby) starring Nikolaj Coster Waldau.

The group was founded in London in 1990 by the British conductor, singer and writer Paul Hillier and is regarded as one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles.

After several years in the USA, Hillier returned to Europe in 2004 and settled in Denmark, where the ensemble is based today. In 2013, the group was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize.This inspired the ensemble to commission even more Nordic repertoire, leading to a North Atlantic tour in 2019, performing works from Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Denmark and Estonia in both concerts and local workshops.

Theatre of Voices performs at major international festivals, concert halls and opera houses such as the Teatro Real (Madrid), Palais Garnier (Paris), Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall (NY), Barbican Center (London), Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg) and Sydney Opera House.The 2020 season – in which the Theatre of Voices celebrated its 30th anniversary – began with a grand celebration at Kings Place in London and, despite Covid-19 restrictions, continued with virtual and live activities in Germany, England, Italy and Greenland, recordings as holograms for 16 performances in Hong Kong and ended with an online Christmas concert in collaboration with the National Bank of Colombia. A particular focus of the year was on environmental issues and sustainability.

Naomi Sato studied sho (traditional Japanese mouth organ) with Ko Ishikawa at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music while majoring in saxophone. She has collaborated with many composers and ensembles around the world. Since 2004 she has been a soloist in the Atlas Ensemble (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and gives workshops at the Atlas Academy.
She has performed with the Ives Ensemble, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Aurelia Saxophone Quartet (Netherlands), the Diotima Quartet, the Ensemble Cairn (France), the Fontana Mix Ensemble, the Xenia Ensemble (Italy), the Ictus Ensemble, the B’Rock (Belgium), the PHACE (Austria),Ensemble Resonanz (Germany), Shonorities (United Kingdom/Greece), Prague Modern (Czech Republic), the New Music Network Philadelphia, the N-JP project (USA), the Vancouver Intercultural Orchestra and the Orchestra Metropolitain (Canada).

She has been invited to music festivals such as Estovest Festival (2014 in Italy), MA Festival (2015 in Belgium), Ars Musica (2016 in Belgium), Royaumont Festival (2017 and 2020 in France), Nasimi Festival (2018 in Azerbaijan).

Also involved in the music theater productions “Rette Uns, Okich” (production of the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin 2017 and repetition 2018), “Koerikoeloem” (production of the Gaudeamus muziekweek in Utrecht 2017-2019), “De Yoshi and Musek vum Wind” (production of the Philharmonie Luxembourg 2018), “The Key” (Tête à Tête Opera Festival in London 2019).

More Information:

https://theatreofvoices.com/

https://www.sato-naomi.com/

Bernd Franke

Ort: St. Nikolaus, Anton-Winkler Str. 10, 83435 Bad Reichenhall

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