Compositions from female hands: Kick-off for the Erika Frieser Chamber Music Days
She was the first female professor of piano chamber music in the history of the Mozarteum University, a long-time duo partner of Gerhard Mantel and a member of the Beethoven Trio. in 2021, she will be the namesake of a festival format dedicated for the first time to the compositional work of women through the centuries in three top-class concerts on May 15 and 16: Erika Frieser. Among the participants in the Chamber Music Days: Juliane Banse, Andreas Martin Hofmeir, Klara Flieder, Enrico Bronzi, Christine Hoock, Pietro De Maria, and others, as well as students - the concerts will be broadcast live!
"One of the first formative experiences for me - at that time still a student at the Mozarteum - was a graduate concert of the piano chamber music class of Erika Frieser. This gave rise to the idea of paying tribute to the first female professor of piano chamber music in the history of the Mozarteum," says Biliana Tzinlikova, initiator of the first Erika Frieser Chamber Music Days and head of a piano chamber music class at the Mozarteum University. The mission: to give women's compositional work a bigger stage. "Many works by women have not (yet) been given the place they deserve. Habits and entrenched role models are responsible for this; an unbiased view is therefore called for and is probably the most important prerequisite for a dialogue at eye level." "Of light and shadow and abundant expressive palettes" tells the program of the first concert evening, which opens with Amy Beach's (1867-1944) Suite for Two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies op. 104 (1924) and plunges right at the beginning into a somber, melodically and harmonically strongly chromatically colored sound world. A highly successful concert pianist, Amy Beach was one of the first significant composers of serious music in the United States. The evening's song program follows a thread of insights into sensitive, searching artists' souls and their reflections on artistic activity, which are brought together in images of nature. The biographies also reveal remarkable parallels and connections: They all revolve around Paris in the broadest sense. The pianist, who was famous during her lifetime for her numerous bittersweet salon pieces and songs, and is known today primarily for her Concertino for flute and orchestra op. 107 pianist and composer Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was born and privately educated in Paris, as was Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), who was ill throughout her life and died at a very young age. In 1913, she became the first woman ever to win the Grand Prix de Rome of the French scholarly society Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which was traditionally accompanied by a scholarship to study at the Académie de France in Rome.young (French) artists from this very academy in turn met Fanny Hensel (1805- 1847), who had studied privately in Paris for a short time and herself organized salons for artistic exchange in Rome during her trip to Italy in 1839/1840. Not only did the newly crowned Rome Prize winner Charles Gounod pay her the highest tribute as a composer and pianist, but a good acquaintance also did the honors: Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910), opera singer, pianist, composer, vocal pedagogue, editor, multitasking salonière (like Fanny Hensel) and, not to be forgotten, native Parisian. Paris is also the city in which the Finnish-born composer Kaija Saariaho (*1952), who has already received numerous prizes and awards, has lived since 1982 or since her studies at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique. Henriëtte Bosmans' (1895-1952) opulent, highly expressive Sonata for Cello and Piano (1919) is still rooted in the late Romantic tradition and captivates with a wide range of expression and extreme cantabile of all themes. The Lamento for tuba and piano (1977) by Sofia Gubaidulina (*1931) represents a tonally dark, instrumental lament that combines the baroque tradition of the sigh motif with a strongly chromatic, post-tonal musical language. The piece, or rather its title, can certainly be seen as the composer's reaction to her situation in the repressive Soviet regime, which had defamed and banned her compositions. Masterpieces from three generations of "modern" women composers will be heard in the second concert. Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) studied composition with Dmitri Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1940 to 1947. Her T rio for clarinet, violin, and piano was written shortly thereafter, in 1949, during her aspirations following her studies. Ustvolskaya's compositions are characterized by a distinctive tonal language of compositional radicalism and consistency in the elaboration of the musical material. Johanna Doderer (*1969) dedicated her 2nd Piano Trio (DWV 52) of 2009 to the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), who had died a good 200 years earlier. Thoughtful musical architectonics and lightness establish references to the important innovator and pioneer of Viennese Classicism. Doderer's composition is a postmodern and post-tonal work. She does not shy away from tonal allusions and reminiscences. Her composition is refreshing, energetic, and in many places allows one to make connections to the lightness of music of the Viennese Classical period. Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) composed her Piano Trio in 1921 , which won her 2nd prize at the Coolidge International Prize in Berkshire in the USA. The tritone proves to be a central building block in this piece, both motivically and harmonically. Clarke's composition impresses with a consistent compositional working through of the musical material. Under the motto "Wegbereiterinnen" is the program of the third concert. It begins with the Quartet for 4 Violins by Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969), probably one of the most important Polish women composers of the first half of the 20th century. She was the first to gain international reputation and to assert herself in a patriarchal and conservative Polish musical world, breaking the lance for the recognition of women composers. Forced by the cultural-political doctrine of Socialist Realism to find more or less recalcitrant ways of composing, she produced, among other things, a synthesis of elegant, technically refined, strongly neoclassical-tinged musical language and Polish folk music themes. The following String Quartet in C major, op. 58 by Dora Pejačević (1885-1923), with its late-Romantic extended, partly impressionistic, expressionistic and atonal harmonies, identifies the composer as the "boldest personality of the harmony sphere" in Croatia in the first decades of the 20th century, where she opened the door to new developments. The French composer Louise Farrenc (1804-1875), on the other hand, with her Piano Quintet No. 1 in A minor, Op. 30 (1840), pioneered the establishment of intellectually challenging chamber music in opera-drunk 19th-century Paris.the program for the Erika Frieser Chamber Music Days was developed in exchange with all participants. "It is a pleasure for me that so many excellent musicians, teachers and students of our house are taking part. My special thanks also go to the Institute for Equality and Gender Studies, especially to Michaela Schwarzbauer and Iris Mangeng for their support and tireless enthusiasm in making this project happen," says Biliana Tzinlikova. An accompanying program booklet with comprehensive texts on the concerts as well as detailed biographies of the participants and Erika Frieser was produced under the direction of Iris Mangeng.
