UB ends fall semester with a double header

As part of the Slee/Visiting Artist Series, the UB Music Department hosts the Swedish contemporary music ensemble Norrbotten NEO for a mini-residency that includes a concert, a composer workshop, and several instrumental master classes. The Thursday, December 4, 8pm concert in Slee Hall features contemporary works by European and American composers.

Composer Rolf Wallin

Artistic director Petter Sundkvist, an expert in the performance of 18th- and 19th-century music, is the leader of Norrbotten NEO, Sweden’s newest voice on the contemporary music scene. The ensemble has a core of seven musicians: flutist Sara Hammarström, clarinetist Robert Ek, percussionist Daniel Saur, pianist Mårten Landström, violinist Christian Svarfvar, violist Linnea Nyman, and cellist Erik Wahlgren. For their performance at UB, Norrbotten NEO have invited Magnus Andersson, a guitarist who has played a significant role in the creation of the modern guitar repertoire, and is a two-time winner of the Swedish Gramophone Prize, as well as the Composers Union Interpreter Prize.

Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin’s The Age of Wire and String (2005), named after the debut novel of the same name by the American writer Ben Marcus, consists of many exquisitely surreal miniatures. According to the composer, “This wonderful and highly unusual book describes a world totally different from ours, a world that defies earthly laws of nature, but that still seems to have its own set of laws and logic, consistent, yet ungraspable..” Movement titles such as “Half-life of Walter in the American Areas” and “Food Storms of the Original Brother” have not detracted from the popularity of the work, which has already received dozens of performances around the world, helping make Wallin the most widely known Norwegian composer since Grieg. A new work, Trio (2008), by the Swedish composer Fredrik Hedelin, is also on the program. .

The program also features a pair of works by Italian composers. Fausto Romitelli’s Nell’alto dei Giorni Immobili (1990) is an 11-minute piece written for six instrumentalists, with the possibility of using up to seven additional players. Romitelli, who died in 2004 at the early age of 41, tried to break down the boundary between art music and popular music. Interested in the differences between noise and music, Romitelli used amplified and distorted acoustic and synthesized sounds, in his own words, as “material to build” his sonic landscapes. Arpège is a brilliantly textured, colorful work for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and vibraphone, composed in 1986 by Romitelli’s teacher, Franco Donatoni (1927-2000). Donatoni had a long, illustrious career as a teacher in Milan and Rome, and the list of his high-profile pupils include the Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, to whom Donatoni dedicated his last work, dictated from his deathbed. Salonen, conducting his orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, later premiered the work.

UB composition professor David Felder wrote Partial [dist]res[s]toration (2002) as an extended slow movement for the New York Chamber Music Ensemble. Musical materials are manipulated throughout the work, much in the manner that new furniture is distressed to make it resemble antiques. Felder has noted in a past interview that the title for the piece came to him while channel surfing. After a flashy opening, the work dissolves, he says, into “a [musical] space in which a lot of things are resonating.” The final movement, “die felder sind grau,” initially emerged to Felder from the Bruce Hornsby tune “Fields of Gray.” It was composed so that the University at Buffalo’s Slee Concert Hall “would sing in response to the resonances.”

Beethoven cycles on

On Friday, December 5, the Ives Quartet returns to Buffalo to perform the third program in the venerable Slee/Beeethoven cycle of the complete Beethoven string quartets. The members of the Ives Quartet are no strangers to Buffalo audiences, having previously performed Beethoven programs in 2004 and 2007. Friday evening’s performance includes the Quartet in D Major, Op. 18 No. 3, the mighty Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, and the first of the Rasumovsky Quartets, the Quartet in F Major, Op. 59 No. 1. The Ives Quartet has gleamed critical praise for its aptitude for engaging with the unique language of string-quartet composers and performing music from the inside out. The members of the Ives Quartet are also committed to string-ensemble coaching and music education, and will give a master class on Saturday, December 6 at 10am in Baird Recital Hall.

For more information, visit: www.slee.buffalo.edu or call 645-2921.