+ Soeben aus den USA zurückgekehrt. Drei wunderbare Konzerte in Washington, Philadelphia und New York. Begleitet wurden wir von Karlheinz Essl, unserem composer in residence dieser Tour! Weiter unten gibt's mehr zum Lesen, inkl. hervorragender  Kritik zum Konzert in Washington.

+ In zwei Wochen starten wir die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Sirene Operntheater. 9 Kurzopern werden im Wochentakt uraufgeführt. Mehr dazu unter den Konzertterminen.

+ Im Juli geht's überdies für Konzerte, Vorträge und Workshops nach Indonesien! In Kürze dazu mehr...

Cecelia Porter, Contributing Classical Music Critic, The Washington Post

On 30 April, ensemble on_line filled the Austrian Embassy’s handsome atrium with exciting music spanning the last quarter century. But, even within that brief time period, this outstanding team of international musicians demonstrated impressively how widely the range of styles has varied.  Although the works performed by the group in April are rooted in the aleatoric, serial, and electronic visions of composers active around the mid-20th century, there was much that was new, as heard in music by Gerald Resch, Beat Furrer, Marcel Reuter, Simeon Pironkoff (founder and director of the group), Karlheinz Essl, Leah Muir, and Gerard Grisey.

Inspired by philosopher Vilem Flusser’s book on phenomenology, Resch’s “Gesten” (2002) combines a violin and cello in suavely contrapuntal lines subtly agitated in mood. Furrer’s
Presto” (1997) couples flute and piano in a series of intriguing vignettes often giving rise to unexpected non-pitch sonorities. Reuter wrote his “Interludio” (2007) for clarinet, cello, and piano, joining their particular idioms in passages of lyrical finesse. In Pironkoff’s “Spiel(t)raeume (2006), the composer exploits widely contrasting timbres ranging high in the keyboard sonic spectrum to low, the result being an illuminating soundscape mirroring electronic musical effects. Karlheinz Essl’s “Sequitur II” (2008-2009) sets the deeply colored sound textures of the bass clarinet against those produced and reproduced electronically, often resulting in flowing echo effects that thematically unify the entire structure.  Muir’s “I frammenti di desiderio, act four ‘study on osmolovsky’s cather icons’” (2009) unites clarinet and cello in a continuous sonic dialogue, even asking the clarinetist to create timbres through “partials” obtained by overblowing. Grisey’s “Talea” (1985-1986) is an impressive and alluring piece for five performers-- divided into a wind and string group—playing a total of nine instruments: the standard flute, its alto and bass relatives, and piccolo; cello, the b-flat clarinet and its bass version; piano; and violin. The work’s structure follows that of medieval and renaissance music built on repeated metric units.   

Every piece was superbly performed by flutist Sylvie Lacroix, clarinetist Theresia Schmidinger, violinist Johannes Dickbauer, cellist Martin John Smith, pianist Mathilde Hoursiangou, and Essl on live-electronics. The ensemble’s American tour also included performances in Philadelphia and New York.

Cecelia Porter

Contributing Classical Music Critic, The Washington Post