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Press conference August 28, 2007

Collaboration between LIVA Linzer Veranstaltungsgesellschaft mbH and
Linz 2009 Kulturhauptstadt Europas OrganisationsGmbH


Featured Speakers
Deputy Mayor Dr. Erich Watzl, City Commissioner in Charge of Cultural Affairs and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Linz 2009 GmbH
Martin Heller, Artistic Director of Linz09
Wolfgang Winkler, Artistic Director of LIVA Linz, Peter Androsch (Concept Music Linz09)

Tuesday, August 28, 2007, 10 a.m.
Brucknerhaus Linz, Untere Donaulände 7, 4020 Linz

1. PLANNED COOPERATIVE ENDEAVOURS

Collaboration between Linz09 and LIVA Linzer Veranstaltungsgesellschaft mbH, one of Upper Austria’s most important cultural institutions, establishes a solid basis for the Capital of Culture year’s activities in Linz.
At the same time, this relationship sets up an ideal constellation to provide a musical programme of superb quality. After all, LIVA, as the region’s foremost cultural impresario, is the gateway to the world of high culture in Linz. Its degree of public acceptance is extraordinarily high. These cooperative endeavours thus bring together two organizations striving to achieve artistic excellence, and promise to launch a process of dazzling creativity. In this way, the spirit of the Capital of Culture year will also make its presence felt throughout the entire programme staged in the Brucknerhaus.

The programme elements to be produced jointly by Linz09 and LIVA will span an arc between regional quality and international standards. Starting with Linz09’s overall musical concept—the sociopolitical statements it seeks to make and its theoretical approaches—and embedding it in the LIVA programme will make it possible to translate and implement that concept in the form of presentations that really make it come alive. Conversely, having LIVA as its partner relieves Linz09 of the necessity of starting from scratch in developing event organizational skills of its own. Staging events becomes a matter of efficiently utilizing the means and know-how already at hand.


2. JOINT PROJECTS
2.1. Projects in the Brucknerhaus

Montezuma – Falling Eagle
Musical theater by Bernhard Lang
Text by Christian Loidl
July 2009

Montezuma – Falling Eagle, based on a text by Christian Loidl (1957-2001), is a lyrically refracted account of the last days of Montezuma. The projected work of music theater aspires to textual polyphony in that the primary plot is overlaid by the story of Syd Barret, the legendary founder of Pink Floyd, and brachiated into additional lyrical text compositions by Loidl. The staging of this production will feature a theatrical installation that conducts the audience to a wide variety of individual locations throughout the Brucknerhaus over the course of the evening.
The ensemble (Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Nova, six solo vocalists) is, in turn, de-localized through the integration of electronic amplification and real-time processing (Wolfgang Musil) and, analogously to the elimination of the barriers separating the individual narrative strands, the production fluctuates between concert and concert installation.

The suspension of boundaries, the dissolution of (space) contours and the ecstatic opening of space are the programmatic components of the mise en scène. Musically, the piece uses looped gesticulations and synchronized movements of bodies and sounds to explore difference/repetition machinery.

On another level, inherent in this work is the commemoration of Christian Loidl, friend and inspiration. It is a sort of tribute to him and the high-energy scene he was a part of.

Bernhard Lang, born in 1957 in Linz, completed his musical studies at the Bruckner Conservatory and in Graz. From 1977 to 1981, he worked with various jazz groups as composer, arranger and pianist. His intensive encounters with electronic music and computer technology at the IEM Graz led him to program CADMUS in C++, a development environment for computer-aided composition. At the IEM, he went on to develop the Looping Tom loop generator and the VLG visual loop generator with Winfried Ritsch.
Since 2003, Lang has been heavily into dance (collaboration with Xavier Le Roy, Willi Dorner and Christine Gaigg). That was also the year he began his tenure as Professor of Composition at the KUG–University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz. From July 2004 to March 2005, he was an artist-in-residence at Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany. In 2006, Lang was key composer at Wien Modern. He has been engaged as 2007-08 composer-in-residence at the Theater Basel, Switzerland.
Bernhard Lang has frequently been a featured artist at Steirischer Herbst and made numerous guest appearances at events such as the Moscow Alternativa Festival, Moscow Modern, resistance fluctuations in Los Angeles in 1998, Tage Absoluter Musik Allentsteig I and II, Fall Festival 98 Lisbon, the Munich Opera Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Salzburg Festival, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik et al.
Among his musical collaborators are Christian Fennesz, Christoph Kurzmann, Dieter Kovacic, Steve Lacy and Phil Jeck. His oeuvre also includes a composition for a radio play (Der Himmel ist Bodenlos, Vienna 2001), a theatrical score (Der Blutige Ernst, Burgtheater 2001) and a film soundtrack (Norbert Pfaffenbichler).
Website Bernhard Lang

Linz native Christian Loidl (1957−2001) earned his doctoral degree in 1984 and was then active as a freelance writer of radio plays, prose and essays, as a poet and a translator. His primary emphasis was on lyric poetry and performance. He was a co-founder of the School for Poetry in Vienna (1991) and the Praterstraße literary salon (1988). He collaborated with many musicians including Beat Furrer, Bernhard Lang, Christoph Herndler, Marwan Abado, Otto Lechner, Wolfgang Musil, Martina Cizek and Helmut Neundlinger, and with graphic artists such as Joseph Kühn and Georg Stifter. Loidl was a member of the Graz Writers’ Congress and the Podium literary circle, and appeared at many poetry festivals including Struga (Macedonia), Poetry Spring (Lithuania), Milano Poesia, New Rage Festival (Amsterdam), Festival de Poesia (Medellin), Austrian Psycho Nites (Berlin), Fall Festival (Lithuania) and the International Poetry Festival in Rosario, Argentina.
On December 16, 2001, an accident in Vienna claimed the life of Christian Loidl.
Website Christian Loidl


Festival 4020. Mehr als Musik: SONG
May 6-9, 2009
Artistic Director: Peter Leisch
Programme: Peter Leisch and Alois Fischer

Just as its programmatic subtitle says, Festival 4020 has been offering “more than music” since 2001. Aficionados of long standing as well as newcomers to these musical delights are offered a festival programme featuring forgotten, non-mainstream, infrequently performed and highly unconventional works. In particular, the festival defines itself as an effort to build bridges from music to literature and other arts. In 2009, it will be held twice. The first installment will be dedicated to song as the age-old terrain of the human voice and thus to a musical form that works with melody and language to tell stories.

Festival 4020. Mehr als Musik: SONG spans an arc from the folk songs of Luciano Berio (1925−2003), contemporary approaches to the oeuvre of Franz Schubert, and the vocal artistry of the Renaissance that reached its full flowering in the works of Barbara Strozzi (1619−1677) and John Dowland (1563−1626) all the way to the virtuoso creative anarchy of free vocal improvisation.

A wide array of songs will be performed by exceptionally talented artists and interpreters: Max Nagl, a star of the Austrian jazz scene known for his versatility and highly innovative improvisational work; Linz native Bernhard Lang, an internationally renowned Austrian composer, performing his “Song Book”; Georg Jungwirth presenting his new cycle based on “Songs of Innocence and Experience” by English visionary William Blake (1757–1827); as well as free improvisations by Basque vocal acrobat Bénat Achiary and Australian sound poet Amanda Stewart. Additional tonal elements will be contributed by vocalist Judith Lehner, harpist Reinhild Waldek and a tripartite configuration featuring the Extended Heritage ensemble, countertenor Bernhard Landauer and electronic musician Burkhard Stangl.


Festival 4020. Mehr als Musik: GOTT
November 4–9, 2009
Artistic Director: Peter Leisch
Programme: Peter Leisch and Alois Fischer

The second, late-Fall edition of Festival 4020 addresses the question of God and thus of the roots of religiosity itself, and thereby faces one of the most basic issues of human existence. Festival 4020. Mehr als Musik: GOTT brings together a whole series of answers that emerge from peripheral realms of human experience.

The Huelgas Ensemble, one of the world’s best groups specializing in Early Music, will give two late-night concerts featuring Renaissance liturgical laments. No less renowned, the Klangforum Wien will perform “Four Chants for Crossing the Threshold” by Gérard Grisey (1946-1985), one of the seminal works of contemporary modernism. Festival 4020 is also pleased to welcome Miriam Andersén und Sabine Lutzenberger, two of the world’s most important interpreters of Early Music; they will be performing works from medieval France.

Lebanon is the home of Sister Marie Keyrouz, one of the most charismatic voices of the Christian sacred music of the Near East. She will join the Ensemble Vocal de la Paix in a concert dedicated to the traditional sacred songs of the Melkite, Maronite and Aramaic Churches. Also from the Near East is the Tehran Symphony Orchestra headed by composer Nader Mashayeki. This formation, which easily holds its own in a comparison with more prominent European ensembles, will appear at Festival 4020 on the same evening program with American free jazz legend Cecil Taylor.

The Austrian scene is represented by improvisational collective Plasmic; young composer Elisabeth Harnik; pioneering quarter tone trumpet virtuoso Franz Hautzinger, who will premiere his “Red Earth” project in collaboration with his Lebanese partners Mazen Kerbaj and Sharif Sehnaoui; composer Klaus Lang, who has been commissioned to create a piece of church music; and, last but not least, Markus Kupferblum, who has interwoven Jean Cocteau’s one act play “The Beloved Voice” with compositions by Giacinto Scelsis (1905-1988) and adapted this work for an ecclesiastical setting.


2.2. Projects at Posthof

Fouché
A Chamber Opera by Franz Hummel
Libretto: Sandra Hummel
January 2009

Fouché was Napoleon’s chief of police, monk and instructor priests, Jacobin, master of intrigue, intellectual mass murderer, and the inventor of total state surveillance. Having amassed great wealth and nearing the end of his days, Fouché—with the half-hearted approval of Metternich—flees into exile in Linz. Sensitive and subtle, highly educated, totally amoral, the Fouché that arrives in Upper Austria is a pitiable creature. Day in and day out, he ambles about the penitentiary-like central courtyard of his villa, constantly casting his searching, anxiety-ridden gaze towards a lone figure standing atop a distant hill. Is it Bonaparte? Is the man pursuing him? Keeping him under surveillance?

Fearful visions alternate with hybrid attacks and reveal the utterly dire straits in which he now finds himself, the man who had been obsessed with power but had always played second fiddle, the man whose cunningly weaved web of espionage and betrayal had finally come to be regarded as treacherous by the man of action himself: Napoleon.

Robespierre, Marat, Danton, Louis XVIII, Lafayette, Napoleon, Josephine Bonaparte: as figures who each played a role in his past, they emerge from the anonymity of the chorus to torment Fouché’s memory. But Fouché, a man synonymous with abuse of power and corruption who was, at the same time, a loyal, caring husband and father, also comes across as the prototype of an unloving and unloved individual who was driven by the compulsion to know everything about everyone and ultimately ended up a human wreck.

This dramatic psychogram of obsession with power is made to resound by Ensemble09 under the direction of Thomas Schaupp. This is a parable à la Hieronymus Bosch about a phenomenon that still haunts the corridors of democracy, albeit with far less audacity, elegance and wit.

Franz Hummel is widely acclaimed as one of Europe’s most original composers. He first emerged as a virtuoso pianist, performing in concert throughout Europe and the USA and issuing more than 60 albums covering virtually the entire classical-romantic canon as well as many modern works.
Hummel’s operas, symphonies, and works of ballet and chamber music are performed by the world’s foremost musicians and orchestras. Several of his operas—currently numbering 13—have been staged at numerous venues all over Europe—for instance, “Blaubart,” a parable about Sigmund Freud, has been performed 120 times in Moscow, Paris, London, Rome and other places.
The lengthy list of prominent artists who have interpreted Hummel’s works includes Carmen Piazzini, Heinrich Schiff, Gustav Rivinius, Liana Issakadse, Ulf Hoelscher, Elena Denisova, Rivka Golani and Giora Feidman. He regularly improvises with world-famous klezmer clarinetist Giora Feidman. Hummel’s first musical, “Ludwig II. - Sehnsucht nach dem Paradies,” was seen by 1.5 million viewers until the end of 2003 at the Neuschwanstein musical theater erected especially for this work. His oeuvre also includes a musical about Richard Wagner and a folk music musical, the first work of its kind anywhere.
His “Sinfonia funebre” premiered in January 2006 in Kobe in commemoration of the victims of the devastating earthquake there. That same year, he completed his “33 Veränderungen über einen Walzer von Anton Diabelli”; its performance by Carmen Piazzini will soon be released on CD in co-production with the Bayerischer Rundfunk. In addition to Fouché, Hummel is currently working on an opera based on material by Friedrich Dürrenmatt that will premiere at the new Erfurt Opera House in September 2008.

Sandra Hummel trained as a singer, lyric poet and essayist, and has published numerous works. In recent years, she has written opera libretti and radio plays—most recently “Bruckner, der Musikant Gottes” for a production by the Bayerischer Rundfunk, and the libretto for the opera “Der Tüfel geit um” for the Erfurt Opera House. She is also a composer, contributing the music in her collaboration with Augsburg, Germany pedagogue Ursula Galli (text) to the children’s musical “Im Land der Aymathobolus.”
Sandra Hummel is the wife of composer Franz Hummel and, with increasing frequency of late, is responsible for the texts on which his compositions are based.


A Dozen of Europe
12 new EU member states − 12 months − 12 concerts
Bulgaria − Estonia − Latvia − Lithuania − Malta − Poland − Romania
Slovakia − Slovenia − Czech Republic − Hungary − Cypress
Project Idea and Execution: Werner Ponesch
Throughout 2009

Over the course of 12 months, 12 evening concerts will be dedicated to each one of the 12 “new” EU member states. Interesting musicians and bands from each respective country will take the stage at the Posthof.
The invited artists have hardly made an impact on Western European popular music because the decades-long existence of the Iron Curtain prevented regular cultural exchange among the countries it divided.
Our so-called Western popular music scene is still clearly characterized and dominated by “Western” musicians and groups. Nevertheless, there have indeed been individual bands from Eastern Europe—especially from the Balkans—who have made a name for themselves in the West too—for instance, Le Mystere des Voix (Bulgaria), Vanilla Ninja (Estonia), Hypnotix (Czech Republic), Warsaw Village Band (Poland), Fanfare Ciocarlia (Romania), Laibach (Slovenia) and Korai Öröm (Hungary).
In conjunction with Linz09, “A Dozen of Europe” will showcase some of the outstanding representatives of the music scenes emerging in these countries. The concept calls for covering the broadest possible spectrum of popular music styles (NO CLASSICAL!) with a heavy emphasis on the respective current trends.
The concerts will be staged—sometimes simultaneously—in the particular Posthof performance venue that best complements the respective musical style—for example, jazz in the intimate space, pop/rock in the medium-sized hall, and hiphop/electronic in the large auditorium. DJ sets might also be a part of the after-concert lineup.


2.3. Project in the Public Sphere

Parade
Concept: Keith Goddard and Peter Kuthan
April 2009 (Thursday to Saturday prior to the Linz Donau Marathon)

“Parade” draws upon the wealth of music that has been created at different times and in diverse cultures for marches and parades, processions and promenades—essentially, for walking together en masse—and Linz09 invites members of the public to partake of these personal and communal auditory experiences while striding through the urban soundscape.

For the Capital of Culture’s parades, Keith Goddard and Peter Kuthan have selected and compiled outstanding pieces of music from all points on the compass—Europe’s center, peripheries and beyond. The cityscape is the stage; the harbor and Pöstlingberg the culmination points.

Making their way through the city will be a variety of ensembles and orchestras representing a wide array of cultures; their music-making apparatuses will include the human voice, brass instruments, bagpipes and antelope horns. In going about this, each group will go at its own pace and leave it up to the marchers and listeners to determine their own individual mode of partaking of this peripatetic performance.

Keith Goddard hails from Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. He is a composer as well as a prominent human rights activist and director of GALZ, Zimbabwe’s gay and lesbian organization. In 1989, he founded Kunzwana Trust, an NGO whose aim is to aid musical development as well as the construction and distribution of musical instruments. In 1997, Goddard collaborated with Peter Androsch, Klaus Hollinetz, Lukas Ligeti and Werner Puntigam to develop a composition project entitled “Six Reflections on Tonga Music.”
The Tonga, an African ethnic group living in a valley of the Zambezi River along the border with Zambia, is renowned for one of Africa’s greatest musical styles—ngoma buntibe (referred to as budima in Zambia). Playing it calls for five to seven various-sized drums and more than 30 individual wind instruments made of antelope horn (nyele).
As a project staged by Linz’s Stadtwerkstatt in conjunction with Upper Austria’s Festival of the Regions and as a follow-up to “Six Reflections on Tonga Music,” the African group Simonga crossed the Totes Gebirge mountain range in Upper Austria in 1997. Over the ensuing years, the Tonga have repeatedly occupied the spotlight of a cultural exchange program sponsored by Kunzwana Trust and the ARGE Zimbabwe Friendship initiative in Linz.


2.4. Composition Commissions
have been granted to the following artists:
Johanna Doderer
Keith Goddard
Doug Hammond
Franz Hummel
Katharina Klement
Bernhard Lang
Bernd Preinfalk
Judith Unterpertinger


3. LIVA’S FOCAL-POINT THEMES DURING THE CAPITAL OF CULTURE YEAR
3.1. International Bruckner Festival 2009 (working title: Music and Image)
3.2. Emphasis on Haydn