Lera Auerbach: Demons + Angels
Sunday, 17. November 2019, 16:00
Lera Auerbach © Lera Auerbach
With her complete unflappabilty, her exuberant, even excessive ideas about form and conception, Lera Auerbach could easily belong to the baroque. Her list of works and arrangements contains, for example, seven different cycles of ›24 Preludes‹. In her choice of color and stylistic devices, she similarly refuses to be intimidated by current boundaries; as well as baroque, you can also detect romantic, mediaeval and Renaissance influences in her always distinctive style. After all, Lera Auerbach is — as was more frequently the case in the former glory days of musical history than now – not just a composer, but piano virtuoso, conductor and writer as well. In fact in 1996, she was even nominated writer of the year by the International Pushkin Society. Born in Chelyabinsk in the Ural mountains in 1973, she exchanged Russia for New York during a concert tour in 1991. In 2019, she moved to Vienna, where in her quasi debut, she will conduct the first complete performance of her double cycle combining two separate choral works in the Minoritenkirche. An intensive, immersive undertaking that will have a running time equivalent to at least two feature-length films, because it depicts paradise and the underworld in a total 144 sections. The first cycle for choir and the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet is a meditation on the 72 Hebrew names of the angels, those emissaries who turn various religions into a single human whole. The second cycle is a piece on the names of 72 demons attributed to King Solomon and found In a 17t-century book of spells. Since the demons in this mysterious book personify, for Lera Auerbach, everything seductive, she attributes to them sounds that are even more beautiful than those for the angels – a good opportunity to experience Quatuor Béla, famous for its «diabolical technique» (Télérama), in its Austrian debut.
»If you come to a concert and you leave the same person, then you’ve just wasted two hours of your life. For me it’s very important that the music touches, brings memories, transcends, maybe disturbs, but that It really affects you emotionally and intellectually, and gets you involved. Because listening, experiencing music is an active process. It’s not just, oh let’s sit and relax. It has the intensity of life and death. It’s what makes life worth living.« (Lera Auerbach)
Artists
Cracow Singers,
Chor Chorleitung Karol Kusz
Rebecca Palmer,
Sopran Goetia.72
Matylda Stasto-Kotula,
Alt Goetia.72
Jakub Borowczyk,
Countertenor Goetia.72
Lukasz Dziuba,
Bass Goetia.72
Karol Kusz,
Tenor Goetia.72
Quatuor Béla,
Streichquartett
Vocalforum Graz,
Chor Chorleitung Franz M. Herzog
Maria Suntinger,
Alt 72 Angels
Bettina Wechselberger,
Sopran 72 Angels
Christoph List,
Altus 72 Angels
Gernot Heinrich,
Tenor 72 Angels
Gerd Kenda,
Bass 72 Angels
Raschèr Saxophon Quartet,
Quartett
Lera Auerbach,
Leitung
Program
Lera Auerbach: Demons and Angels
Lera Auerbach
Goetia.72. In umbra lucis (2019) EA
***
Lera Auerbach
72 Angels. In splendore lucis (2016)
Remark
Produktion Wien Modern