world premeire of A NEW work BY DANIEL PETER BIRO (Victoria)
featuring noa frenkel, contralto (isreal/holland)
and SVEN THOMAS KIEBLER, PIANO (Germany)
saturday, october 3, 2009, 8pm
scotiabank dance centre, 677 davie street
Tickets $25 regular, $15 student/senior, available from Sikora’s Classical Records (432 West Hastings) at Tickets Tonight (ticketstonight.ca/ 604.684.2787, surcharges apply) and at the door.

A musical/textual commentary on an ancient Hebrew Bible text (Jeremiah 34:8-22), Dániel Péter Biró’s Kolot (Sounds/Voices) exists as a sonorous analogy to contemporary problems of enslavement through economy, nation, language and history.  In composing the piece Biró reflects on the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, the rise in extremist nationalism and religious fundamentalism throughout the world, and how "the economic dominance of the market serves to enslave us all – for the time being."

The concert will feature internationally renowned contralto Noa Frenkel. Frenkel is an admired interpreter of contemporary music. She performs regularly with renowned ensembles such as the Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt and the Ensemble Recherche, Freiburg, and has performed recently with the Schonberg Ensemble, Amsterdam and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Paris.  She is the soloist of the Dutch ensemble MAE whom with she regularly performs and tours Europe, Japan and the United States. 

Also on the program are Chaya Chernowin’s Shu Hai Mitamen behatalak kidon (1996-97) and Luigi Nono’s Omaggio a György Kurtag (1983-86).


Dániel Péter Biró is Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Victoria. Awarded the Hungarian Government's Kodály Award for Hungarian composers, his compositions have been performed at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Austria, at the Bartók Festival in Szombathely, Hungary, at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Germany, at the LITSK Festival for Computer Music in Princeton, U.S.A., and have been broadcast on Swiss, Austrian, German, and Italian State radio. . In 2008 he was a featured composer and lecturer at the International Messiaen Week in Neustadt, Germany. Dániel Péter Biró is co-editor of Search - Journal for New Music and Culture
http://people.finearts.uvic.ca/~dpbiro/

Chaya Czernowin was born and raised in Israel. Through her studies with Abel Ehrlich, Brian Ferneyhough, Dieter Schnebel and Roger Reynolds as her dissertation mentor and various scholarships and prizes, Czernowin has been able to focus intently on refining her unique musical language since the age of twenty-five, living in such diverse regions as Germany, Japan, the United States and Austria. Her music has been performed at more than 30 festivals all over the world, including most festivals for new music in Europe.

Luigi Nono (1924-1990) was an Italian composer, and law student. He came to public attention in 1950 with his work Variazioni Canoniche, orchestral variations on a 12-tone theme of Arnold Schoenberg, whose daughter Nuria he married in 1955. An avowed communist, Nono often produced works of political substance, many of which sparked controversy and reaction. He employed aleatory (chance) techniques and serialism, sometimes fragmenting language and using electronically manipulated sounds. His best-known work is the opera Intolleranza (1961).