Viola Voilà by Esther Apituley

Esther Apituley

Viola Voilà

Format: CD
Label: Challenge Classics
UPC: 0608917216523
Catnr: CC 72165
Release date: 14 February 2013

1 CD

Label
Challenge Classics

UPC
0608917216523

Catalogue number
CC 72165

Release date
14 February 2013

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

In polar the regions dwells a strange animal with paws made of crystal, in the form of a tall champagne glass with a round base, a bit like the rackets people use in order to walk through deep fresh snow. These beasts are called hydropaths, and they are made of snow and ice. Their eyes resemble multi-coloured pearls. Hydropaths. ‘Hydro-‘ means ‘water’, thus rock crystal, and ‘-paths’ (‘pattes’) means ‘paws’. Hydropaths are creatures that can walk on water. On the ‘Discovery channel they have not yet heard of these beasts made of snow and ice, but in the fantasy world the impossible becomes possible.

When playing the viola I can sometimes vanish into the great void; then my bow and fingers take on a life of their own. These moments are an unusual and pre- cious blessing. After intense wrestling with the instrument I am rewarded with something I would call a temporary state of higher consciousness: I lose myself in the music, which takes me on a journey. I wander through distant, dazzling land- scapes of ice and snow. The strings of my viola cause the crystal landscape to vibrate; I shudder, shimmer and melt.
I have just become a hydropath.

Esther Apituley

De altviool als solo-instrument in een divers repertoire
Dit album bevat verschillende werken voor altviool, uitgevoerd door Esther Apituley. Zij wordt op de piano begeleid door Rië Tanaka. Op het album staan werken van uiteenlopende componisten, waaronder enkele bewerkingen.

Met haar opnames op dit album bewijst Apituley dat de altviool geschikt is als solo-instrument. Apituley is in staat om met zich met haar instrument op alle mogelijke manieren muzikaal uit te drukken.

Apituley beschrijft haar ervaringen met het bespelen van de altviool als volgt:
"Binnen de poolcirkel leeft een wonderlijke diersoort met poten van kristal, in de vorm van een champagnefluit op een rond voetje, een beetje als de rackets die mensen gebruiken om door de diepe verse sneeuw te kunnen lopen. Deze beesten worden hydropathen genoemd, ze zijn van sneeuw gemaakt en van ijs. Hun ogen lijken op veelkleurige parels. Hydropathen. ‘Hydro’ betekent water, rotskristal dus, en met ‘pathen’ wordt bedoeld patte: poten. Hydropathen zijn wezens die over het water kunnen lopen. Bij Discovery Channel hebben ze nog nooit gehoord van deze uit sneeuw en ijs gemaakte beesten, maar in de fantasiewereld wordt het onmogelijke mogelijk.

Bij het bespelen van de altviool kan ik soms verdwijnen in het grote niets. Dan gaan strijkstok en vingers een eigen leven leiden. Die momenten zijn een zeldzaam en kostbaar goed. Na intens vechten met het instrument wordt ik beloond met iets wat ik een tijdelijke staat van hoger bewust zijn noem: ik verdwaal in de muziek die mij meeneemt op reis. Ik zweef over verre, oogverblindende landschappen van ijs en sneeuw. De snaren van mijn altviool brengen het kristallen landschap in trilling, ik sidder, zinder en smelt. Ik ben even een hydropath geweest."

Artist(s)

Esther Apituley

Esther Apituley was born in Amsterdam. She started playing the violin at the age of twelve and quickly moved on to the viola.
She graduated from the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, having been taught by Mischa Geller, and went on to study with Bruno Giuranna at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin.
Esther Apituley was one of the instigators behind the Microkosmos project, to music by Béla Bartòk, a performance with visual elements by Jeroen Henneman. The NPS broadcast Microkosmos as a series.
Apituley presented the TV programme ‘Reiziger in Muziek’ (Traveller in music) in 2000.
Esther Apituley has appeared as a soloist with ensembles including the Dutch National Ballet Orchestra, North Holland Philharmonic, Metropole Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra. She has performed viola concertos by Berlioz, Bartok and Chiel Meijering, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Lachrymae by Britten.
Ms. Apituley also makes regular international solo appearances in Japan, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. In the summers of 2007 and 2008, she gave concerts and masterclasses at the International Music Festival in Campos do Jordao, Brazil.
Esther Apituley is now well known for her quite unique way of presenting concerts. For instance, her appearances with the Amsterdam Viola Quartet also represent a particular break from tradition. The Quartet’s repertoire is wide-ranging, from baroque through classical to modern and close harmony.
They have now had considerable success at home and abroad, including appearances in Morocco, the Czech Republic, Austria and Cyprus, and a lengthier tour of Indonesia in 2010. The Amsterdam Viola Quartet is also regularly joined by guest artistes, such as the tap dancer Peter Kuit, actor Hans Dagelet, whistler Geert Chatrou or mime artist Rob van Reijn. The Quartet has now given thirty or so concerts with actors Hans Dagelet and Lizzy Timmers, in “De Hydropathen”.
Her first CD, 'Violent Viola', appeared in 2005 and was followed in 2007 by 'Viola Voila', to very warm reviews in all the newspapers. Her third CD, including works by Brahms and Poulenc appeared in 2011.
Esther Apituley was appointed artistic director of the ViolaViola Foundation in 2009. This Foundation is devoted to promoting the viola, and also to encouraging new audiences, partly through the medium of the Viola Festival. After successful runs in 2012 and 2014, the third edition of the festival – entitled Esther Apituley’s Locomotive – will be held in 2016.

less

Rie Tanaka

Amsterdam Viola Quartet

Eric Calmes

Mieke Honingh

Ernst Grapperhaus

Rogier van der Tak

Composer(s)

Esther Apituley

less

Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. Schubert already died before his 32nd birthday, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.
It was in the genre of the Lied that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism. Schubert expanded the potentialities of the genre like no other composer before.

less

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of these transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase" which continued with works such as Renard, The Soldier's Tale and Les Noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony), drawing on earlier styles, especially from the 18th century. This style was often referred to as Neoclassicism. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, and of instrumentation.

less

John Cage

John Cage was an American composer and music theorist. He was a pioneer in the implementation of indeterminacy in music, as well as in his use of non-standard musical instruments and electroacoustic ways of generating sound. He was one of the leading composers of the 20th century and propelled the post war avant-garde movement. His teachers included Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.
Cage is perhaps best known composition 4′33″ (1952), which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces.

less

Henri Vieuxtemps

Richard Drigo

Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré was a French Romantic composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Nocturnes for piano and the songs Après un rêve and Clair de lune. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

less