Postponed: Composer Festival – Zone Zero

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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.

In Trurliade – Zone Zero for solo percussion and orchestra, Olga Neuwirth’s fascination with film, wind-up toys and robots is highly evident. The title refers to a character – Trurl – from Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem’s short stories collected in The Cyberiad. The music is incredibly sophisticated, with a connection to artist Jean Tinguely’s sculptural machines which swing between humour and the utmost gravity.

One of Olga Neuwirth’s many sources of inspiration is the music of Greek composer Iannis Xenaki. Shaar for strings contains many typical traits of his music: notes sliding between different pitches, solidly attacking clusters of notes, manically repetitive rhythms, and a sense of archetypical, ancient ritual.

Anaptyxis is a word borrowed from the Greek and can mean development or unfolding. It is used in historical linguistics to denote special changes in sound. The orchestral piece Anaptyxis is dominated by processes in which the music is constantly changing. As is often the case with Olga Neuwirth, the percussion emerges clearly, here with cymbals, bells, sirens and anvils.