Solitaires by Boulanger Trio

Various composers

Boulanger Trio

Solitaires

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: CAvi
UPC: 4260085533459
Catnr: AVI 8553345
Release date: 05 February 2016
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Label
CAvi

UPC
4260085533459

Catalogue number
AVI 8553345

Release date
05 February 2016

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

The title 'Solitaires' evokes the singularity of each work on this album; each of these works needs to be polished like a diamond, as Karla Haltenwanger, the pianist of the Boulanger Trio, remarks. Violinist Birgit Erz adds: 'We want to shed new light on the piano trio genre by focusing on small, concentrated forms. In such short pieces, everything needs to be immediately in place: the tuning, the attitude, the timbre, from the very first second!'

Artist(s)

Boulanger Trio

The German newspaper Die Welt described a performance of the Boulanger Trio as irresistible, while Wolfgang Rihm wrote in a letter: To be interpreted in this way is surely the great dream of every composer. Founded in Hamburg in 2006 by Karla Haltenwanger (piano), Birgit Erz (violin) and Ilona Kindt (cello), the ensemble is now one of the few full-time piano trios currently based in Berlin. Already in 2007 they won the 4th Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition in Norway, followed by the Rauhe Prize for New Chamber Music in 2008. The ensemble has received crucial musical guidance from Hatto Beyerle, Menahem Pressler, and Alfred Brendel. In the past years, the trio has gained an excellent reputation in the world of...

In the past years, the trio has gained an excellent reputation in the world of chamber music, with regular appearances at the Heidelberger Frühling, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker, the Dialogs at Salzburg Mozarteum, and Ultraschall in Berlin. In tandem with chamber music partners such as Nils Mönkemeyer (viola), Sebastian Manz (clarinet) and Andrè Schuen (baritone), the trio has performed at prestigious venues such as the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Wigmore Hall in London and the Philharmonie and the Konzerthaus in Berlin.

In addition to works of the Classical and Romantic periods, the three musicians are much in demand as performers of new music. The Boulanger Trio collaborates with composers such as Wolfgang Rihm, Johannes Maria Staud, Friedrich Cerha, Toshio Hosokawa, and Matthias Pintscher. In 2012, the trio launched its own concert series, the Boulangerie, in Hamburg and Berlin, and starting with this season it is also being exported to the Musikverein in Vienna. At every one of these concerts, a classical composition is performed alongside a piece of contemporary music, the composer of which is always present and talks with the three musicians about his or her oeuvre.

In 2016, the Boulanger Trio added two new recordings on the CAvi-music label to its discography: Solitaires, and a portrait CD celebrating the 90th birthday of Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha, after five previous releases on the Ars and Hänssler Profil labels that featured works by composers such as Shostakovich, Vasks, Liszt, and Schoenberg.

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Composer(s)

Arvo Pärt

Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia, and was raised by his mother and stepfather in Rakvere in northern Estonia. He began to experiment with the top and bottom notes as the family's piano's middle register was damaged. His first serious study came in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Middle School, but less than a year later he temporarily abandoned it to fulfill military service, playing oboe and percussion in the army band. While at the Tallinn Conservatory, he studied composition withHeino Eller. As a student, he produced music for film and the stage. During the 1950s, he also completed his first vocal composition, the cantata Meie aed ('Our Garden') for children's choir and orchestra. He graduated in 1963. From 1957 to 1967, he worked as a sound producer for Estonian radio.
Although criticized by Tikhon Khrennikov in 1962, for employing serialism in Nekrolog (1960), which exhibited his "susceptibility to foreign influences", nine months later he won First Prize in a competition of 1,200 works, awarded by the all-Union Society of Composers, indicating the inability of the Soviet regime to agree consistently on what was permissible. In the 1970s, Pärt studied medieval and Renaissance music instead of focusing on his own composition. About this same time, he converted from Lutheranism to the Russian Orthodox faith.
In 1980, after a prolonged struggle with Soviet officials, he was allowed to emigrate with his wife and their two sons. He lived first in Vienna, where he took Austriancitizenship and then relocated to Berlin, Germany, in 1981. He returned to Estonia around the turn of the 21st century and now lives alternately in Berlin and Tallinn. He speaks fluent German and has German citizenship as a result of living in Germany since 1981.

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Edvard Grieg

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively. Grieg is regarded as simultaneously nationalistic and cosmopolitan in his orientation, for although born in Bergen and buried there, he travelled widely throughout Europe, and considered his music to express both the beauty of Norwegian rural life and the culture of Europe as a whole. He is...

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively.
Grieg is regarded as simultaneously nationalistic and cosmopolitan in his orientation, for although born in Bergen and buried there, he travelled widely throughout Europe, and considered his music to express both the beauty of Norwegian rural life and the culture of Europe as a whole. He is the most celebrated person from the city of Bergen, with numerous statues depicting his image, and many cultural entities named after him.

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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.

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Ernest Bloch

Bloch was born in Geneva to Jewish parents and began playing the violin at age 9. He began composing soon after. He studied music at the conservatory in Brussels, where his teachers included the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. He then travelled around Europe, moving to Germany (where he studied composition from 1900–1901 with Iwan Knorr at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt), on to Paris in 1903 and back to Geneva before settling in the United States in 1916, taking American citizenship in 1924. He held several teaching appointments in the U.S., with George Antheil, Frederick Jacobi, Quincy Porter, Bernard Rogers, and Roger Sessions among his pupils. See: List of music students by teacher: A to B#Ernest Bloch. In 1917 Bloch became the first teacher of composition at Mannes College The New School for Music, a post he held for three years. In December 1920 he was appointed the first Musical Director of the newly formed Cleveland Institute of Music, a post he held until 1925. Following this he was director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Musicuntil 1930.
In 1941, Bloch moved to the small coastal community of Agate Beach, Oregon and lived there the rest of his life. He taught and lectured at the University of California, Berkeley until 1952. He died in 1959 in Portland, Oregon, of cancer at the age of 78. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered near his home in Agate Beach.
The Bloch Memorial has been moved from near his house in Agate Beach to a more prominent location at the Newport Performing Arts Center in Newport, Oregon.

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