Category Archives: Artist Bios

Erin Lesser

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Hailed as a “superb flutist” (New York Times), Erin Lesser has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout Canada, the USA, Europe, Asia and South America. She is a member of Argento Chamber Ensemble, Due East, Scarborough Trio and the Wet Ink Ensemble and was recently appointed as flutist for Alarm Will Sound. Erin spent two years in a fellowship with The Academy—A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute, and continues to perform with Ensemble ACJW as an alumni member. Beginning in the fall of 2011, Erin will be Assistant Professor of Flute at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. Erin is a Pearl Flute Performing Artist.

Ms. Lesser is actively involved in the contemporary music world, having worked closely with composers such as Pierre Boulez, George Crumb, Helmut Lachenmann, Gabriela Lena Frank, Mario Davidovsky, Tristan Murail, Philippe Hurel and Beat Furrer. She has performed with many leading ensembles including Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Eighth Blackbird, Zankel Band, American Modern Ensemble and Sequitur. She has also commissioned many new works with her various ensembles, and presented lectures and demonstrations on flute techniques of the 21st Century.

As a member of the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Erin has performed at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, Shanghai International Electroacoustic Music Festival, Miller Theatre Composer Portrait Series (NYC), NY Microtonal Festival, Monday Night Concerts in LA, and the International Spectral Music Conference in Istanbul. The group also collaborated with IRCAM in a festival of new electroacoustic works at Miller Theatre, NY. Time Out New York critic Steve Smith placed Argento’s CD release of music by Tristan Murail on his list of the Top Ten Classical Recordings of 2007.

Due East, Erin’s flute and percussion duo, won the 2008 National Flute Association Chamber Music Competition. Due East has been ensemble-in-residence at the Universidade de Campinas, Brazil, and the Yellow Barn Festival. The duo has performed at the Warsaw Crossdrumming Festival, Society of Electro Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) National Conference, Percussive Arts Society International Conventions (PASIC) in Texas, Tennessee and Ohio and New Music Festivals at Western Illinois University and University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Their first full length CD “Simultaneous Worlds” will be released in October 2010 on Albany Records.

As a member of the Scarborough Trio, Erin was a silver medalist at the 2004 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, and the 2006 Yellow Springs Chamber Music Competition. As first prizewinners in the Artists International Competition, the trio was presented in a New York Debut recital at Carnegie’s Weill Hall in 2003. They have toured the Midwest with Allied Concert Services, and have performed for the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Florida and the Focus Festival in North Carolina.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Erin was the recipient of the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada Bursary for 1999/2000, and received first prize at the Canadian Music Competition that same year. Her performances have been broadcast on CBC French Radio’s “Jeunes Artistes” series and New York’s WQXR. Ms. Lesser studied with Robert Cram at the University of Ottawa where she received her Bachelor of Music Degree (summa cum laude) in 1999. She received her Master of Music and Doctorate (ABD) from the Manhattan School of Music, where she was a student of Linda Chesis.

 

 

 

Peter Graham

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Peter Graham (real name Jaroslav Šťastný, 1952, Brno, Czech Republic) was recently appointed a senior lecturer at Janáček Academy of Music. Apart from a number of musical pieces, which are ocassionally performed around the world, Graham wrote several books and a number of texts on contemporary music. From 1993-2009, he was a program director of the festival Exposition of New Music in Brno. Since 2003 he has collaborated with OCNM. In 2010 he was a member of the team that translated John Cage’s book Silence into Czech.

Conrad Harris

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Violinist Conrad Harris (1969) has performed new works for violin at Ostrava Days, Darmstadt Ferrienkürse für Neue Musik, Gulbenkian Encounters of New Music, Radio France, Warsaw Autumn, and New York’s Sonic Boom Festival. In addition to being a member of the FLUX Quartet, he is concertmaster/soloist with the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Ostravská banda, and STX Ensemble. He has performed and recorded with such artists as Elliott Sharp, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jean-Cladue Risset, Rohan de Saram, and Tiny Tim. A solo CD featuring premieres by Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma will soon be released on Mode Records.

Hana Kotková

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One of the most distinctive Czech concert artists, Hana Kotková began playing the violin at the age of five and, after graduating from the Ostrava Conservatory under V. Kuzník, she continued her studies at the Academy of Music in Prague with J. Vlach, J. Novák and I. Štraus. She also took part in master classes in Weimar headed by W. Marschner, and later with J. Gingold in Greensboro (USA) during the Eastern Music Festival. In 1990 she was accepted at the Menuhin International Academy in Gstaad in Switzerland, where she perfected her technique under Alberto Lysy, whilst gathering further experience at master classes conducted by P. Amoyal.

She has been appearing in recitals and in concerts with orchestras at home and abroad since 1985 (Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, France), and she records for European radio stations. She has performed with Lysy and Yehudi Menuhin in Europe and the USA, and she performs with English pianist S. Mulligan, with whom she gave her first concert in the Rudolfinum in 1996 on the occasion of Menuhin’s 80th birthday. Also important for her career was a three-year collaboration with the Smetana Trio. In Lugano, where Hana Kotková currently lives, she was invited by Martha Argerich to take part in the festival “The Martha Argerich Project”, together with M. Pletnev, L. Zilberstein and the Capuçon brothers. Her latest CD for the Forlane label in Paris contains the complete Ysaÿe Sonatas for solo violin, which she also recorded for Swiss television. She performed the Czech premiere of Morton Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra at Ostrava Days 2003

Katalin Károlyi

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Born in Hungary, Katalin Károlyi began her musical studies on the violin before studying singing with Noelle Barker and Julia Hamari. She went on to set up the Studio Versailles Opéra with Rachel Yakar and René Jacobs. Since then she has concentrated on repertoire from baroque opera, chamber music and contemporary music. Katalin Károlyi has sung under the direction of conductors such as Yehudi Menuhin, William Christie, Phillip Herreweghe, Laurence Equilbey, Paul van Nevel, Peter Srottner, Bernard Tétu, Roland Hayrabedian, and David Robertson. In 2000 Gyorgy Ligeti composed Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel for her and the Amadinda Percussion Group which was performed at Ostrava Days 2009. She gives regular concerts throughout Europe with Amadinda Percussion Group and Ictus Ensemble. During the 2010-11 season she sang Berio and Ligeti with the Seoul Philharmonic, a new work by Jos van den Putte with the Asko Schoenberg Ensemble and Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel with Ars Nova. She also appears with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a festival curated by Thomas Adés which includes performances of Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel, Stravinsky Les Noces and new opera by Gerald Barry based on The Importance of Being Earnest.

Ostravská banda

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Formed in 2005 by Petr Kotik as the resident chamber orchestra for the biennial Ostrava Days, Ostravská banda consists of young musicians from Europe and the U.S. whose primary interest is the performance of new music. Principal conductors are Petr Kotík, Roland Kluttig, Peter Rundel, Ondřej Vrabec, Johannes Kalitzke, and Barbara Kler. The core instrumentation of 24 players can change according the requirements of each score. The repertoire include composers of the 20th century: John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, Edgard Varese, Luigi Nono, and Gyorgy Ligeti, among others, and our contemporaries Louis Andriessen, Elliot Carter, Christian Wolff, Petr Kotik, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Martin Smolka, Miroslav Srnka, Peter Graham, and Petr Bakla, among many young and emerging composers. Apart from regular performances at Ostrava Days festivals, Ostravská banda performs and tours at such venues as the Paris Conservatoire, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Prague Spring Festival, Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Vredenburg in Utrecht, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and musicadhoy in Madrid, to name just a few.

Janacek Philharmonic Ostrava

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Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava (JPO) is among the five leading symphony orchestras of the Czech Republic. Many conductors have contributed to the orchestra’s artistic development, among them Serge Baudo, Charles Mackerras, Václav Neumann, Libor Pešek, Christian Arming, and Petr Vronský, to name a few. The orchestra‘s current Chief Conductor is Theodore Kuchar. Throughout its 57-year existence, JPO has been a strong advocate of contemporary music. Since 1997, it has regularly performed under Petr Kotík. Performances include large-scale new music events such as the 4-hour concert at the Festival of Music of Extended Duration in Prague in 1997, a program which included performances of 103 by John Cage and Four Meditations by Pauline Oliveros. JPO has also performed several concerts of music for three orchestras since 1999, as part of the project Music in Space – Compositions for 3 Orchestras, conducted by Christian Arming, Petr Kotík, Zsolt Nagy, and Petr Vronský. Other performances include the Prague Spring Festival in 1999, Warsaw Autumn in 2000, and MaerzMusik in 2004. JPO‘s repertoire of pieces for three orchestras includes Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen. Other composers who have worked with the JPO include Somei Satoh, Tristan Murail, Maria de Alvear, and Roscoe Mitchell. Recently, under Petr Kotík, Zsolt Nagy, and Christian Arming the JPO performed, to critical acclaim, large-scale works by Edgard Varese and Tristan Murail along with Morton Feldman‘s Coptic Light and Violin and Orchestra with the renowned Czech-Swiss violinist Hana Kotková. JPO has recorded several works of new music, including 103 by John Cage for the Asphodel label (San Francisco), as well as orchestral works by Somei Satoh and Phill Niblock‘s Disseminate for Mode Records (New York).

Karlheinz Stockhausen

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Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) belongs to the group of European composers who started their professional lives in the early 1950s, gaining important exposure at the summer program in Darmstadt (Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and Henri Pousseur among them). This group was in many ways similar to its counterpart in New York (Cage, Brown, Feldman, and Wolff). The main difference lies in the generous and important support the European composers received in comparison with meager options available to Americans. This allowed the European composers to realize works on an unprecedented scale throughout the 20th century. For example, Stockhausen was able to produce huge projects such as compositions for multiple orchestras and choirs, including Gruppen (1955-57) and Carré (1959-60).

James Tenney

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James Tenney (1934-2006) – composer, teacher, pianist, conductor – studied piano as a child, and from 1952-53 studied engineering at the University of Denver. He then moved to New York, where he studied piano with Schoenberg pupil Edouard Steuermann. Tenney was also a student of Chou Wen-Chung, Carl Ruggles, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo and Edgard Varese. During 1961-64 he was involved in innovative electroacoustic research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked with Max Matthews developing programs for computer sound-generation and composition. He was involved in the ensembles of Harry Partch, Steve Reich and Phil Glass, and with his own ensemble Tone Roads has performed and/or conducted music by Charles Ives, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Erik Satie, Arnold Schonberg, and others. He was also a brilliant and inspiring teacher working at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, California Institute of the Arts, University of California and York University Toronto, and is considered as one of the most important music theorists of 20th century. Tenney’s notable students include John Luther Adams, John Bischoff, Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, Charlemagne Palestine and Marc Sabat.

Christian Wolff

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The son of a publisher in Berlin—Kurt Wolff (who was the first to publish Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, and Walter Benjamin), Christian Wolff probably had some luck in life. He was born in 1934 in Nice, the city to which his family fled from Hitler. However, under dramatic circumstances he and his parents then moved to New York, where Kurt Wolff founded Pantheon Books.

Wolff was a great lover of music, and Christian began taking piano lessons from the closest teacher in the neighbourhood, which happened to be the famous Grete Sultan. When Sultan witnessed her student’s creative endeavours, she recommended that he instead study composition with a friend of hers, who also lived nearby. That friend was John Cage, who found himself dumbfounded by Wolff: He could not comprehend how someone so young was able to write with such originality. Wolff studied under Cage formally for around six weeks, but in fact it was he who had the bigger influence on his teacher, as he did also on Morton Feldman, who was eight years older than him. American experimental music was still in its early stages at that time, and Christian Wolff played no small role in its development. Cage was reluctant to take money from his student, and so Christian, instead, used to bring him books from his father’s publishing company. One book was the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes” (“I Ching”), which had a significant impact on Cage’s compositional technique.

Wolff was not drawn to life as an artist. He went away to study and remained in the university environment to teach Latin and Ancient Greek. But he continued to follow an independent approach to music, directed at effacing the differences between the artist, the interpreter, and the listener.

For classically trained music professionals, their professional education can paradoxically pose a barrier to understanding the music of Christian Wolff. It contains too little of what the professional’s musical experience is founded on—there is nothing to ‘catch hold of.’ It is therefore no surprise that Wolff’s compositions often sound better when interpreted by amateurs. Despite all the intellectuality and sophistication of his musical thought, Christian Wolff is no elitist author of hermetic works for the initiated. On the contrary! His music looks much more to so-called ‘ordinary people’ and in a certain respect is closer to them than the standard ‘popular classics’—all that is necessary is to dispense with the customary snobbery of concertgoers, for whom music has been reduced merely to a symbol of cultural refinement, and to start genuinely listening instead.

In his famous lecture ‘45´for a Speaker,’ John Cage said: ‘Something occurred to me about the music of Christian Wolff: the only way to approach it is to suddenly listen, in the same way that you have to suddenly sneeze when you have a cold …’

Christian Wolff’s work alludes much more to the authenticity of expression in folk and workers’ songs (material often used in his pieces) than it does to typical concert music (even though that was what he grew up on from childhood), but it also relates to Gothic and Renaissance musical thought. In addition, it contains strong non-musical influences: Political conviction, personality features (even Leoš Janáček noted that you can ‘always recognise the composer behind the music’), and in particular poetry. Unlike many others, who conceive of music as ‘drama’, ‘science’, ‘religion’, or ‘show business’, Christian Wolff’s musical pieces are always a kind of poetry of sound. 

A specific feature of Wolff’s music is its very unique humour—that hard to grasp ability to discover an unusual situation and come up with an original solution, which surprises us in such a way that it causes us to relax, and even laugh. When we listen to the music of Christian Wolff, we become aware of just how much pomposity and pathos or sentiment the standard concert repertoire contains, or more precisely, the way it is played. Wolff’s is, however, essentially a joyful and transparently sounding music, which rejects any form of pretence—adopts none of the usual masks.

The composer wants musicians to reach an understanding themselves. He forces nothing on them. I was never able to comprehend this infinite generosity and benevolence of Wolff’s, until I came across an old Zen story: One day a monastery cook forgot to put salt in the soup. Everyone tensely awaited the Master’s reaction. He, however, ate the soup without even batting an eyelid. Then some of them understood what the Art of Living is about: Do not expect the usual flavour, and eat your soup unsalted.

—Jaroslav Šťastný