Ars Musica

Ars Musica takes place in Brussels until 25.04. It is one of the most interesting festival of contemporary music. See the program in English here

French-speaking podcasts (I): Musiq3

For those who want to practise their French while listening to music, I’ll list the best available podcasts I know from French-speaking radios. I begin with the Belgian radio Musiq 3 dedicated to classical music. Their podcasts are available here and one can download all of them through this link
Here is a brief description of the most interesting podcastable programs:

The principle of “table d’écoute” is nice: the same classical piece is listened to several times through different interpretations and the guests (generally musicians or musicologists) have to vote for one of them and explain their choice. Quite instructive about classical music.
“terre de sons” is about world music

“noctuor” presents especially long pieces which cannot be displayed in day time (mahler’s symphonies, beethoven quintett, etc)

“musique et autres muses” presents musical portraits of writers, painters, films directors, choregraphers (eg sartre, stendhal, delacroix, matisse, etc). the idea of the producer is that musical passions often reveal well the personality.

“les classiques de demain” is dedicated to contemporary music (anthony braxton, giacinto scelsi,etc)

“carnet de notes” dedicates each session to one composer in particular

“appassionato” receives each week one guest, a musician, a writer or any other artist, and this guest presents her/his own musical program

Agenda for concerts etc in Stuttgart

An agenda for  good concerts or other punctual events in Stuttgart. Suggestions welcomed

Klezmer in Stuttgart again

The Painted Birds in Laboratorium were moving. Daniel Kahn (above) plays everything and is very funny and tragic in the same time. He sings songs in half-german, half-english, half-ivrit, half-yiddish and it’s just beautiful. Sometimes, they sound like a pop band, with accents recalling Tom Waits of course, or The Tindersticks from the 80’s. As usual for great concerts in Stuttgart there was almost nobody. If you want to have a big audience in Benz-city, just play shitty music.

It’s a Klezmer wochenende in Stuttgart — Today in Laboratorium is playing another klezmer band, Budowitz. They seem less cool, but they are big professionals of Klezmer music, it should be moving. His founder Joshua Horowitz taught in Graz Music Theory and served as Research Fellow and Director of the Klezmer Music Research Project for eight years. He also taught Advanced Jazz Theory at Stanford University with Stan Getz. He wrote eg “The Sephardic Songbook”, “The Ultimate Klezmer”, and he has written several articles on the counterpoint of J.S. Bach.

NY-Klezmer and Tzadik etc in Stuttgart Ost

at Laboratorium today 20.30, Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird: by Jewish-Detroiter singer-songwriter Daniel Kahn on vocals, accordion, piano and guitar with East German Johannes Paul Graesser on fiddle, US expat composer Michael Tuttle on upright bass and a rotating roster of some of Berlin and New Yorks best young Klezmer and Balkan players, the band was formed in Berlin in fall of 2005. Guest artists on the CD include NY downtown Tzadik players Brandon Seabrook & Eric Rosenthal (Naftule’s Dream), Holland’s rising yiddish folk diva Niki Jacobs (Nikitov), and members of Berlin’s “Grinstein’s Mishpoche” and “Shikker Vi Lot.” Like the grotesque Jerzy Kosinski novel from which they take their name, The Painted Bird reminds us that even if man is only an animal, he can still sing.

Professor Bad Trip by Fausto Romitelli

I went to this concert I was talking about of Ictus ensemble last Friday (Professor Bad Trip of Fausto Romitelli) and I can only recommend to anybody reading these lines to listen to this piece. It is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of contemporary music. It is very strong, never boring or pretentious as contemporary music can sometimes be, filled with a “dry sadness”, a sadness which is never pathetic, and often nasty (esp. the cello solo, very beautifully played by François Deppe). Jean-Luc Plouvier (one of the pianists of Ictus) told me that it is certainly the best album of them (and only 12 euros on the site of the excellent Cypres Records). They worked on it for months and together with Romitelli. It is the last album by Ictus that Romitelli could hear before his death (and from what I was told, he was extremely happy with the result). During the concert, I thought that if progressive contemporary music exists, then Professor Bad Trip pertains to this genre. It is a bit like the first Pink Floyd album of classical music. The presence of the electric guitar (sometimes played with distortions) certainly explains it partly. And in fact, this impression was justified, since Plouvier explained me after the concert that Romitelli called this piece after a famous hippie comics from the seventies in Italy (see the drawing above) by
Gianluca Lerici, whose best known comics is an adaptation of William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ (‘Il Pasto Nudo’). Professor Bad Trip was also inspired by the poetry of the Belgian writer and painter Henri Michaux and esp. his works on mescaline and other psychedelic substances. And it’s true that the drawing of Michaux above resembles a bit Professor Bad Trip. The drawing below is by him.

Ictus Ensemble in Stuttgart today

The Ictus Ensemble is an Ensemble playing contemporary music born in Bruxelles. They play today in Stuttgart the piece “Professor Bad Trip” from the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli. Some extracts of this ’spectralist’ piece can be listened here (to the right somewhere).

Ictus Ensemble plays with Rosas, the company of Teresa de Keersmaeker based in Bruxelles. Among the members of Ictus are the pianist Jean-Luc Fafchamps (below) and the violonist Georg van Dam.

Manon filmed van Dam playing a sonate of Bartok in “presto perfect sound” (2006). According to Bartok, this piece should be played in 6 minutes, but Manon told me that it is so hard to play that it is almost impossible to make it so short (but apparently, van Dam managed to)