Postponed: Composer Festival – In the Realms of the Unreal

This year’s international composer festival at Konserthuset is dedicated to Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, one of the major stars of contemporary classical music.

Her music includes traces of Stravinsky, Monteverdi, jazz, pop and hip-hop. But its roots reach all the way back to Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. She is also particularly inspired by visual arts, performance and installation art, literature, theatre and film. It all merges in her music into something entirely new, personal, and infused with a contemporary sound.

Olga Neuwirth was born in 1968 and began playing trumpet at a young age, but a jaw injury put a stop to that career. However, the trumpet is still important to her and this year’s Composer Festival will open with Laki for solo trumpet, followed by fanfare from the opera Orlando, which had its world premiere at the Vienna State Opera in October 2019. It was the first time an opera by a female composer was performed on that historic stage.

With varying techniques, in the string quartet Akroate Hadal, she draws both frightening and ethereally beautiful sounds from the instruments. In this powerfully expressive music, these tonal extremes gradually chase one another, eventually uniting in a common point.

In the Realms of the Unreal, which is also music for string quartet, is a tribute to American artist Henry Darger (1892–1973). It is as if Olga Neuwirth were painting Darger’s highly contradictory fairy tale world, as he described it in a manuscript found after his death. The long title of the manuscript is usually shortened, simply to: In the Realms of the Unreal.

As in both Akroate Hadal and In the Realms of the Unreal, in Quasare/Pulsare II, sharp and rhythmically dense sections are presented beside sections of aural contemplation. Even the piano is prepared to achieve certain effects: objects are placed inside of it to modify the sound. In a concluding incidendo/fluido, the piano engages in commentary on a recording of a tone through curt outbursts, repeated gestures and entire clusters of sound. This masterful music leverages the full potential of the piano.