CONTEMPULS

La Fabrika

November 4, 11 & 16

All eyes are on electronic impresario Miguel Azguime.

Organizers are usually happy to see capacity crowds at their concerts. So it was surprising to talk to Petr Bakla, the chief dramaturgist of this year’s Contempuls festival, after the final performance and hear him confess, “I have mixed feelings about this.”

“This” was the largest audience the festival has ever drawn, chiefly on the strength of star cellist Jiří Bárta, who also packs classical halls like the Rudolfinum. It’s axiomatic in modern music circles that if something is popular, it must not be good – difficult music is for aficionados, who tend to show up in small numbers. Anything else is considered a sellout.

But Bárta proved as adept with contemporary works as he is with the classical canon, staging a fine homage to one of his teachers, Czech composer Marek Kopelent. And Bakla should feel good about his programming, which drew consistently strong crowds on all three nights of the festival. It set the bar high in the first concert, delivered a theatrical jolt in the second, and finished with a rousing electric finale.

American pianist and composer Eric Wubbels opened the festival with nine selections from Voices and Piano. The piece is an ongoing work by composer Peter Ablinger, who uses spectral analysis to create piano accompaniment for vocal excerpts of famous people (Jean-Paul Sartre, Hanna Schygulla and Cecil Taylor, among others in this performance), unearthing nuances and cadences that would ordinarily go unnoticed. As played by Wubbels, one plus one equaled more than two; pinpoint piano work created a third entity, a revealing synthesis of music and ideas.

A workout for Oka and her colleagues.

Opening night also featured Germany’s ensemble recherche, which played a new work (commissioned for the festival) by Czech composer Pavel Zemek, and Helmut Lachenmann’s Allegro sostenuto. Zemek’s piece worked a single phrase long and hard, with unsatisfying results. By contrast, the Lachenmann piece, which is 23 years old, still sounds revolutionary in its rearrangement of conventional musical ideas. It’s also extremely demanding on the players, who are required to produce a range of honks, squeals, taps and scratches, and jump up for occasional gymnastics. Pianist Jean-Pierre Collot, cellist Åsa Åkerberg and clarinetist Shizuyo Oka were superb, weaving abstract lines and crashing chords into a cohesive, compelling work that would fall apart in lesser hands. It was an outrageously good performance that had the audience whooping with approval afterward.

The second night of the festival was devoted entirely to Itinérario do Sal/Cesta soli, a vocal and visual effects piece by Portugese actor, composer and poet Miguel Azguime. Billed as an electronic chamber opera, the one-man show features Azguime serving up a steady stream of inventive nonsense babble supplemented by electronic images and sound effects. At first the piece is riveting, with Azguime’s face appearing in bizarre stylizations on the screens behind him as he seems to be spouting the pain, confusion and frustration of the modern world – a noisy and aggressive place filled with unhealthy, paranoid people. But as the effects start to repeat, their impact fades, and the wordplay projections in the final scenes seem anticlimactic.

Still, Azguime put on an inspired performance, as if the distraught character in Edvard Munch’s The Scream had come to life. And for this critic, one of the enduring images of the festival will be Azguime with his head in a bucket, a surreal figure babbling into a tiny camera that projected a giant solarized image of his earnest, frantic face.

Bárta opened the final night of the festival with five pieces by Kopelent and some of his more illustrious alumni, a group that includes Martin Smolka. Some were solo works, others for a chamber group; all were disarmingly difficult. It was obvious that Bárta had put a lot of work into preparing the pieces – his playing was for the most part at a virtuoso level. Even the effects, which included a solid-body electric cello that sounded more like an electric guitar on Gavin Bryars’ After the Requiem, came off with seriousness and clarity. Bárta may be an established star, but he’s certainly willing to extend his range and take some risks.

The French string quartet Quatuor Diotima plugged in their instruments for the finale: Miroslav Srnka’s Engrams and Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Srnka, arguably the Czech Republic’s best-known contemporary composer, writes incredibly complex pieces, and the quartet showed fine control and mastery of the material. There’s also some humor in Engrams, which came through nicely in their performance. Reich’s piece is literally a ride on the fast track, requiring the musicians to play along with brisk taped musical segments built on vocal snippets like “From Chicago to New York.” It is not the most challenging piece in the repertoire, but it is a great deal of fun to hear. And it was impressive to see the quartet make a seamless transition from a complicated Czech work for strings to American electronica, playing both with skillful aplomb.

Would Contempuls have been more successful if the audiences had stayed away in droves? By some standards. But the combination of outstanding programming and performances, and the crowds the festival drew this year, suggest that Bakla and his colleagues are doing something right. Most importantly, they are giving Prague a modern music festival in tune with contemporary currents, bringing fresh sounds and ideas to a city that could use a lot more of them.

More photos of this year’s festival are posted at: http://www.contempuls.cz/main.php?jazyk=EN

Photos by Karel Šuster

PREVIEW: PHILIP NIKWÉ

Jazz Time

November 19

One of the classiest performers in Prague returns to the club circuit this weekend. After a three-year absence, Philip Nikwé is back with a fresh take on his unique blend of African rhythms and European pop, flavored with tastes of American funk and soul.

A polished pianist and singer who combines nightclub cool with street panache, Nikwé was for several years the one-man house band at the Marriott, serving up sophisticated standards and elegant original works to match the setting. He was forced to put aside performing by the birth of his son, Nell, and a nagging case of tendinitis. With child-reading duties and medical issues now under control, heʼs free to pick up where he left off – with some new flourishes.

“Iʼll be playing in a trio for the first time,” he says. “We will be doing acoustic versions of my songs, which in the past have been much more electronic. And the arrangements will be jazz-oriented, very open to improvisation.”

Nikwé got started in the music business early. His father owned a nightclub in Cotonou, Benin, where Philip hung out as a boy, learning to play the piano and absorbing contemporary West African sounds. After studies in Paris and several years working the clubs in London, he moved to Prague, where he met his wife, the noted fashion designer Alice Abraham. By then, he had recorded his first album, Movinʼ Pata, which set the template for his style: engaging melodies, catchy rhythms and a sultry, romantic sound alternating with techno beats on the dance tracks. That reached full fruition on The Taste of Your Love, a 2002 release filled with great original songs like “Crumbs of Love,” “A Dreamy Night” and “Prisoner.”

Itʼs tempting to classify what Nikwé does as “world music,” but thatʼs not quite correct, at least not in the usual sense of the term, which he feels has demeaning connotations for African performers. “Why are African artists expected to sound exotic, and dance half-naked with a banana belt around their hip?” he says. That may be an overstatement, but it highlights Nikwéʼs approach to music, which has African roots but draws on a smart mix of modern Western sounds with sharp production values.

With two local players behind him – bassist Vladimir Kliment and drummer Radek Němejc – Nikwé, who constantly does remixes of his music, is recasting it this time in a standard jazz format. “Itʼs a quick but quality way to present it, with a formatted introduction and finish, and 5-10 minutes of improv in the middle, depending on the audience and atmosphere,” he says. That should give listeners an introduction to his work and a sense of how many different directions it can go.

Itʼs also a warm-up for touring. “This is a laboratory where we can try some things before going on the road next year,” he says. “Starting in the spring, weʼll be in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam.”

And hopefully, playing more dates in Prague. Nikwé brings a refreshing intelligence and urbanity to the local music scene, along with a distinctive body of work. It will be good to have him back.

To hear some cuts by Philip Nikwé: http://soundcloud.com/search?q[fulltext]=philip+nikwe

PREVIEW: INTERNATIONAL JAZZ PIANO FESTIVAL

St. Lawrence Church

November 12

An original voice from the Mideast.

A funny thing happened to Israeli pianist Anat Fort on the way to releasing her second album, A Long Story. She recorded it in 2004 with bass player Ed Schuller, clarinetist Perry Robinson and drummer Paul Motian, a seminal figure in modern jazz. Motian liked the music so much that he recommended it to Manfred Eicher, founder of the prestigious ECM label. Eicher was impressed enough to sequence and mix the final product himself, reportedly the first time he produced an album without actually being at the recording session.

A Long Story was finally released in 2007 – thus the title – adding to the growing accolades for Fort, who started studying classical piano at the age of 6 and turned to jazz in her late teens. Her first album, Peel (1999), which featured all original compositions played solo and with various combinations of sideman, drew critical praise for its strong musical vocabulary and original voice. Both A Long Story and And If (2010) , also released on ECM, continued the arc of growing acclaim for Fortʼs strengths as a composer and skillful blend of the traditional and original in her playing style.

All of which makes her a great headliner for the opening night of the International Jazz Piano Festival, a set of three concerts at cozy St. Lawrence Church in Malá Strana, each featuring three solo pianists from different countries. Also on the bill this Saturday are Luxembourgʼs Michel Reis and Switzerlandʼs Christoph Stiefel. Fort graciously agreed to answer some questions in a phone conversation last week from her home in Israel.

When did you decide that you wanted to devote yourself to jazz?

Actually, I never was really serious about classical music. I just played because I had fun doing it, and I would improvise on the side. Playing the piano was never something that I thought I would do professionally until I discovered jazz, which was sort of at the end of high school, the beginning of my army service. And when I did, it soon became very clear that I needed to do this.

Did you study jazz in Israel before going to the U.S?

For three or four years. Then what happened was, I was at a summer session at the Eastman School of Music in New York, where I heard about William Paterson [University in New Jersey]. So I called the school and asked for an audition – I guess thatʼs my Israel chutzpah. And they said no, this is not audition time. But I convinced them, and went there the next day, and auditioned and got accepted.

Who are your jazz heroes?

All of them – and itʼs not just pianists. John Coltrane is just as big an influence on me as Keith Jarrett or Duke Ellington or Hampton Hawes; itʼs a matter of musicianship. But of course there are certain times when I listen to a lot of jazz piano, and so itʼs the people that I mentioned, and also Paul Bley, and Marilyn Crispell, and all the traditional ones too – Art Tatum and later on Cedar Walton and Red Garland and Wynton Kelly – you name it.

Critics cite a lot of other influences in your work, like Mideastern music.

I think whatever people want to hear, or can hear, they will hear. If I wanted them to hear something specific, I would probably write lyrics – but I donʼt, and thereʼs a point to that.

Thereʼs one tune that appears in three different instrumentations on A Long Story called “Just Now.” I remember clearly, when I was writing that tune, I was on the fjords in Norway. I had never been there, but I just had that feeling. It was something very Nordic that I was hearing, and it just kind of came out. When I was with Manfred [Eicher] in the studio when he was mixing the album, he looked at me when he heard that tune and said, “Tel Aviv, huh?” Well, yeah, itʼs Tel Aviv, because Iʼm from Tel Aviv. But I was thinking about the fjords in Norway. So Iʼm a lot of things, and eventually they will all come out.

What are you working on now?

An orchestral piece. Iʼm doing my doctorate in musical composition at a university in Israel, and thatʼs part of what I have to do – which is a really cool excuse to write a piece for piano and orchestra. Hopefully I will have a chance to perform it. There are already discussions about that, which would be very exciting and interesting for me. I wrote one orchestra piece that was never performed, so itʼs exciting to know that this could actually see the light of the stage some day.

So you do both jazz and classical composition?

Yeah, though I donʼt really like to categorize too much – itʼs just music, you know? Most of the work I do is for smaller ensembles, because I have a working trio, and itʼs easiest for me to write for that band. But Iʼll use any excuse to write for bigger groups, even if I just add a couple people, or a whole orchestra.

Have you been doing more solo outings lately?

Yes, which is wonderful for me, because I donʼt like to do just one thing. The fact that Iʼve had a working trio for about 12 years now doesnʼt mean thatʼs all I want to do; I always need a mix of projects. So to do a little solo work, a little trio work, some collaborations with other people, some writing, some teaching – thatʼs pretty healthy for me, and I try to keep that balance.

Iʼm also excited about coming to Prague. Iʼve never been there, except passing through the airport, and I know itʼs a great city for music. So Iʼm looking forward to this performance.

For more on Anat Fort: http://www.anatfort.com/

For a complete festival schedule: http://www.jmw.cz/

PREVIEW: CONTEMPULS

LA FABRIKA

November 4

Playing along to Sartre, Schygulla and Lucier.

American pianist and composer Eric Wubbels open this year’s Contempuls festival with a performance of Peter Ablinger’s Voices and Piano. Perhaps best-known as a member of the Wet Ink Ensemble, a New York collective devoted to creating and promoting contemporary music, Wubbels has performed extensively in the United States and Europe, and his pieces have been played at festivals around the world. Before leaving for Prague, Wubbels graciously agreed to answer a few questions via e-mail.

Of all the different types of music you could have chosen to pursue as a career, what prompted you to go into contemporary music?

Even when I was very young and playing the classical repertoire, I was always most attracted to music and sounds that were new and unfamiliar to me. I think I liked, for example, Scriabin and Messiaen before I liked Mozart and Haydn. Beyond that, as a composer, you have no choice but to be “contemporary.” And making a life in the international contemporary music scene has been extremely exciting and rewarding for me.

At Contempuls, you’ll be performing Peter Ablinger’s Voices and Piano, a cycle of short pieces he wrote as accompaniment for recorded statements by notable figures ranging from Jacques Brel to Orson Welles. How many of them will you be playing?

There is no standard set; the performer always selects a group of “voices” from the catalog. At this point, there are almost 40 pieces in the cycle, so it’s not possible to play them all in one concert. Ablinger seems to feel that an optimal version of the work includes 6-12 selections, with a mix of languages, types of figures (from the arts, politics, philosophy, etc.) and genders. In Prague I’ll be playing nine selections, including [American jazz pianist] Cecil Taylor, Slovak poet and translator Mila Haugová, philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre, composer Morton Feldman, actress Hanna Schygulla and Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut.

You’ll also be premiering a new segment featuring contemporary composer Alvin Lucier. How does it compare to the others?

Some of the pieces in the cycle have very simple piano parts, while others are extraordinarily virtuosic (to the point of impossibility!). In general, the more complex the piano part, the higher the “resolution” with which it represents the musical characteristics of the voice. The Cecil Taylor movement has maybe the highest resolution of any movement to date, while this new Alvin Lucier segment is perhaps the simplest – single notes, each with its own dynamic and registral placement, at a moderate tempo. It’s like a piano piece by Webern – compressed and essentialized, the Voices and Piano concept at its most distilled.

You say on your website that you “love these pieces.” What in particular do you find interesting or appealing about them?

They’re beautiful, original and captivating as pieces of music, and yet they have all of these other resonances, based on who’s speaking and what they’re saying. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, there is an extremely unusual aspect to them that I would call “scientific,” in that in listening to them, you come to understand (in a deep, experiential way) something that you hadn’t understood before. The comparison between speech and music in these pieces, while it seems obvious on some level, is executed with tremendous imagination, conceptual rigor and human feeling.

As someone who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, have you found any significant differences between the contemporary music scenes in the U.S. and Europe?

Less and less, though there is perhaps more of a tradition in New York and the U.S. of “do it yourself” – that is, creating ensembles, venues and record labels, rather than relying on pre-existing ones to support you. In the past, it seemed that the grass was greener in Europe in terms of government funding, but that seems to be changing, too. In addition, the Internet has made “the audience” less of a localized thing – in my experience, you can find a sympathetic ear anywhere.

You performed at Contempuls in 2009. How are you feeling about coming back?

I’m very glad to be a part of this year’s Contempuls festival. And I can’t wait to get back to Prague – it’s a wonderful city! I’m also very excited to hear ensemble recherche play Lachenmann’s Allegro Sostenuto, which is a classic.

For more on Eric Wubbels: http://www.wubbelsmusic.com/news.html

To see him play a segment from the Voices and Piano cycle: http://vimeo.com/8401045

PREVIEW: KIMMO POHJONEN

Veletržní palác

November 2

A surreal melding of man and music.

Is there any instrument on the planet less hip than an accordion? That is, unless it’s in the hands of Kimmo Pohjonen, a Finnish musician and performance artist who has boldly taken the accordion places no one even thought of going before.

There was Earth Machine Music, a series of performances amid roaring engines on farms. (“Lock up your tractors! An electrifying concert with live farm machinery!”). And Accordion Wrestling, with Pohjonen providing accompaniment for body-slamming in the ring. And KTU, a collaboration with bass player and guitarist Trey Gunn and drummer Pat Mastelotto – better-known as the rhythm section of the prog-rock band King Crimson – that produced two albums and concert tours stretching from Moscow to Mexico City.

And in 2004, Uniko, a work developed with the Kronos Quartet that premiered in Helsinki, sold out three performances at the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York, and was recently released on DVD. Pohjonen will be reprising Uniko in Prague on Wednesday night with percussionist and longtime collaborator Samuli Kosminen and the Proton String Quartet, an ensemble from Finland.

Just don’t ask him to describe what it sounds like.

“I can’t put it in any box or categories,” he says. “The only thing I can say is, for me, it’s like Finnish weather. It can change a lot. It can sometimes be very nasty, and sometimes very beautiful. But otherwise, I can’t really describe it.”

This foray to the outer edges of the avant-garde had a surprisingly traditional beginning. Pohjonen picked up the accordion when was 10 years old, mostly at the behest of his father, who is also an accordionist. “We were in a small village where we would go to an accordion club, and I was the only young kid there, surrounded by older people playing music that old people like,” he recalls. “It was very uncool to be an accordion player at that time.”

So much so that Pohjonen eventually dropped the instrument to pursue studies in classical, folk and world music. But even musical sojourns to places like Tanzania and Argentina left him unsatisfied. Then, in the mid-’90s, he had an epiphany.

“I decided, I know the accordion best, I have to do something with it that pleases me,” he says. “So I turned to electronics and amplifiers, and started to manipulate the sound. And suddenly I heard so many great things I had never heard from that instrument! Then as I began composing my own music, I finally realized it’s worth playing.”

The electronics really took off on Pohjonen’s second album, Kluster, which he recorded with Samuli Kosminen.

“Samuli is a percussionist and electronics genius, and he had the idea to sample sounds from my accordion, then play them through his electronic drums,” Pohjonen says. “It was like having two accordion players on the record, but the other one is a percussion player. I was very excited about this idea.”

So was violinist David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, who called Pohjonen after hearing his first album to suggest they do a project together. “I told him what I was doing with Samuli, and he said it would be great to do the same thing with strings,” Pohjonen says. “So Samuli and I started to compose some new pieces – I did most of the melodies and harmonies, and he did the manipulations for strings and accordion.”

The handful of live performances of Uniko were well-received, but the Kronos Quartet’s demanding schedule has made them hard to re-create. So Pohjonen finally decided to use another string ensemble.

“The two guys you can’t replace are Samuli and me,” he says. “It’s easier to replace the string quartet, because most of their parts are written. Samuli and I do a lot of improvisation, but other quartets can play the string music.”

And while Pohjonen may not be able to describe the music, he can tell you where it is likely to take you.

“My concerts are like a long journey inside to many things,” he says. “It’s so great to hear the stories afterward. Somebody tells you they thought of their mother, who died long ago. Somebody else was in hell, and it wasn’t so awful – it was red, but it wasn’t so awful, it was actually a pleasure. I think that’s a great thing, that we create something onstage, and you can create your own image in the audience, and have your own journey.”

And you don’t even need to bring the tractor.

To see the performance with the Kronos Quartet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o86Uh_5MoEw

For more on Uniko with the Proton String Quartet: http://www.kimmopohjonen.com/nav.php?url=proton.html

Photo: Marita Liulia