8TH INTERNATIONAL PHAROS CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL
CONCERT
Cyprus premiere of György Kurtág’s
masterpiece Kafka Fragments by mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg & violinist
Aisha Orazbayeva
WEDNESDAY 12 OCTOBER 2016
/ 8:30PM
THE SHOE FACTORY, NICOSIA
The 8th International Pharos Contemporary
Music Festival will continue on 12 October 2016, 20:30 at The Shoe Factory,
with a concert featuring the Cyprus premiere of Kurtág’s monumental
70-minute masterpiece for voice and violin, written in 1987, Kafka
Fragments. The work is based on Kafka’s texts taken from his notebooks,
diaries, and letters, and will be performed by the internationally acclaimed
mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg and violinist Aisha Orazbayeva.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE WORK:
It was during his brief exile in Paris that
György Kurtág became truly fascinated with the writings of Kafka, especially
his Metamorphosis. At the same time, he was familiarized with the
contemporary music scene of the West, and studied with Messiaen and Milhaud.
In the following years, the composer assembled random fragments of Kafka’s
writings – not excerpts from the published works but fragmented texts from
his notebooks, diaries, and letters, which we would eventually use as the
basis of the forty pieces that constitute his monumental 70-minute
masterpiece for voice and violin, Kafka Fragments. This introvertly
theatrical work might also be regarded as a personal diary of both Kafka and
Kurtág, with the music and dramatic utterances of the vocalist and violinist
complementing and accentuating Kafka’s texts and his inmost thoughts.
Ranging from miniature parables to existential metaphors, these
all-embracing texts are sometimes witty, sometimes soul-searching, yet
always all-pervading into the human state of isolation, physical and
emotional torment, life, love and creativity. Equally kaleidoscopic is
Kurtág’s music, which is sometimes reserved and introspective and sometimes
explosive and highly dramatic, and in which folk idioms blend imaginatively
with Baroque and 19th century aesthetics as well as avant-garde and
Expressionism.
LORÉ LIXENBERG mezzo-soprano
“…Lixenbergs' rich powerful voice has an
almost bewildering range of colours and a breathtaking upper register…”
Metro
Born in the UK, Loré Lixenberg has performed widely in opera, concert
repertoire and music-theatre, and she has collaborated with many leading
composers. She has performed internationally at a number of festivals
including those of Salzburg, Lucerne, Aldeburgh, Wien Modern, Oslo Ultima
and London Symphony Orchestra Cage Festival. She has appeared with
orchestras and ensembles including the Halle, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra,
Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Radio Orchestra, Ensemble
InterContemporain, London Sinfonietta, Klandforum Wien, Icelandic Symphony
Orchestra and Danish Royal Opera. She has collaborated with and performed
the works (often the world premieres), of composers such as Georges Aperghis,
Bent Sørensen, Helmut Oehring, Mark-Anthony Turnage, György Ligeti,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Beat Furrer, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter
Maxwell-Davies, Earle Brown, Luc Ferrari and Gerald Barry. Loré Lixenberg
has collaborated closely the creator of the avant-garde movement Lettrism,
Isidore Isou, and she premiered his soundworks. Having appeared to much
acclaim in venues such the Danish Royal Opera, the Royal Opera Covent
Garden, the Barbican, the Bayreuth, Venice’s La Fenice and Japan’s Suntory
Hall, she has also been active as a director and a composer herself, and she
has recorded the premiere of the complete Cage’s Songbooks for Sub Rosa on
CD, as well as Frederic Acquaviva’s Aatie on CD/DVD. She published an arts
book, Memory Maps, as well as her first monographic CD The afternoon of a
phone, and she recorded song cycles with Brodsky String Quartet for Chandos
in 2015.
AISHA ORAZBAYEVA violin
Violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is in high demand
in a repertoire extending from Bach and Telemann to Lachenmann and Nono. As
a soloist, she has performed at the Aldeburgh, Radio France Montpellier,
Reykjavik Art, Klangspuren and Latitude festivals, amongst other, and in
venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York, Superdeluxe in Tokyo and La Maison
de Radio France in Paris. Her two solo albums, Outside on Nonclassical and
The Hand Gallery on PRAH recordings, have gained international audience and
critical acclaim. Orazbayeva has performed live on BBC Radio 3 and 4,
Resonance FM, France Musique and Kazakh National TV. She collaborates with ensembles including Plus-Minus and Apartment House in London, and
regularly collaborates with the artist, writer and theatre director Tim Etchells (their first vinyl EP, Seeping Through, was released in March
2016.)
INFORMATION & TICKETS:
Information: Pharos Arts Foundation Tel. (+357) 22-663871 /
www.pharosartsfoundation.org
Tickets: €10
for the concerts. All other events are
Free Entrance.
Box Office: Directly from the Foundation’s website
www.pharosartsfoundation.org or Tel. 9666-9003 (Monday-Friday
10:00am-3:00pm)
Educational Activities: The Festival will host a great number of educational
activities, some of them in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and
Culture, which will be open to the public. For more information about these
activities please contact the Pharos Arts Foundation.
LORÉ LIXENBERG
AISHA ORAZBAYEVA