St. Louis, MO – The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts will host a performance with works by 20th -century composers Franco Donatoni and Gérard Grisey on Saturday, March 11th at 7:30pm (doors open at 7:00pm). The concert is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.
The works featured will include Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck by Donatoni and Vortex temporum by Grisey. The concert will be performed by SLSO musicians and will be conducted by Pascal Rophé, Music Director Designate of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège and frequent conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. The selected works coincide with the Pulitzer’s exhibition, Minimalism and Beyond, which focuses on artists working in the 1960s, as well as those of a younger generation who have both redefined and continued the legacy of Minimalism.
Donatoni titled his piece Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck (Somewhat Calmer in Expression) after the eighth bar of Schoenberg’s piano piece Op. 23 No. 2. About this, Donatoni wrote, ”One always finds it difficult...to understand what is going on at that point. There is something elusive in those few notes, something which evades what must happen and invites one to think about what can happen.” Every note of Donatoni’s piece is derived, in some way, from that single bar of music and is a high-speed, pianissimo example of what else could have happened in Schoenberg’s piece.
In Grisey’s Vortex temporum, the title (“Vortex of Time”) defines the birth of a system of swirling, repeated sounds that metamorphose into different fields of time. Grisey was fascinated by the notion of time, and this composition plays a subtle game on the idea of the duration of sound.
The next concerts in the Minimalism and Beyond series will be back-to-back performances on April 6th and 7th.
Tickets are available through the Powell Symphony Hall box office at 314-534-1700 or through their website, www.slso.org. Tickets for the event are $20.00. Availability is limited due to venue size (100 tickets). Visit www.pulitzerarts.org for more information on the exhibition and concert series.
Chamber Music Program
March 11, 2006 at 7.30pm
DONATONI Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck (1967)
Susanna Self Huppert, Flute
Scott Andrews, Clarinet
Peter Henderson, Piano
Eva Kozma, Violin
Ken Kulosa, Cello
GRISEY Vortex temporum (1994-96)
Daria Binkowski, Flute
Scott Andrews, Clarinet
Jim Meyer, Bass Clarinet
Peter Henderson, Piano
Alison Harney, Violin
Kathleen Matthis, Viola
Ken Kulosa, Cello
