Exciting bursts of color, dystopia, a Karelian-language folk music riot, and industrial brutalism – you have likely never heard a lineup quite like this in a concert hall!
Program:
Julius Eastman (1940–1990): Evil Nigger *
George Antheil (1900–1959): Ballet mécanique
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971): Les noces
* Julius Eastman was an African-American composer who named this work intentionally provocatively.
Performers:
Minna-Leena Lahti, soprano
Anna Danik, mezzo-soprano
Jere Hölttä, tenor
Nicholas Söderlund, bass
Sini Koskelainen, folk singing
Emil Holmström, Mirka Viitala, Aleksei Zaitsev & Heini Kärkkäinen, piano
Somnium Ensemble
Avanti!
Kaapo Ijas, conductor
Four grand pianos on a concert stage is a rare and impressive sight! It exudes power and almost limitless possibilities to produce a rolling mass of sound. Four pianists desperately pounding their instruments is also a quite provocative apparition, one that spoke to Julius Eastman. As an African-American in a heavily white-dominated US music scene, he became a living example of racism and discrimination, which he unhesitatingly laid bare in his works.
Eastman's 1970s works for four pianists are a challenge to all of us who, in some way, represent the mainstream of classical music. Even the extremely disturbing title of tonight's work forces us to confront inequality and the complex social setup it brings. With his works, Eastman has erected a monument to prejudice built of mirrors.
George Antheil represents a very different picture of an American composer. For him, provocativeness meant brawling within his own circles and forcing the machine-romanticism of the 1920s into concert halls. Ballet mécanique was originally composed as a score for Fernand Léger's short film of the same name. Music and image became one significant work celebrating machines and humanity's dystopian trajectory. Noise, industrial soundscapes, and the physicality of sound in general were the core substance of this music; originally, Antheil even demanded sirens and an airplane engine for his performance machinery. With later performances, the instrumentation simplified without the music losing its rugged impact!
These works, or at least their ensembles, would not exist without Igor Stravinsky's dazzling stage work Les Noces. Behind the story of Les Noces lies a strong proto-feminist undercurrent: a young woman is forced to marry a foreign nobleman. The bride is powerless as the wedding ritual and the guests roll over her. The combination of Stravinsky's industrial-spirited orchestration with the directness and roughness of the folk music style is blood-stopping in this context. In the interpretation by PianoEspoo and VocalEspoo, the bride is presented as an even more isolated figure: her part is sung by folk music artist Sini Koskelainen in the Karelian language – instead of Russian – while the mass of black-clad wedding guests surrounds her threateningly.
The concert is a co-production of the PianoEspoo and VocalEspoo festivals and Avanti!Event Details
Supported by the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation.
Duration
Approx. 1 h 50 min, incl. intermission.
Tickets
37 / 34 / 17 € + order fees (from 1.50 € + 0.65% of the order via www.lippu.fi)