MBZ TALK: before Klangforum Wien concert

The performance of the Klangforum Wien, this time under the baton of Johannes Kalitzke, brings together three exceptional personalities who wrote these pieces for this ensemble and who regularly take their concepts to the extreme—from Chaya Czernowin’s involvement in the context of global existential issues and the study of sound and tactile textures beyond, as she put it, rationality and conventions, questions of fascism and suffering in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1940s in the composition by the politically mordant Mirela Ivičević that has already been performed, to the total pleasure that brings bliss in the well-known composition by the forthright and versatile Sara Glojnarić.

All three themes pry into the human psyche and go beyond the boundaries of traditional musical aesthetics. They cut and change, recognizing that the experiences of the otherworldly and unknowable, pain and discomfort, but also of a great delight are equally important. Intimate experiences and insights are expressed in different ways: in her composition, Ivičević refers to her grandfather’s suffering in the context of the aforementioned war, while Glojnarić interweaves the experiences of the Klangforum Wien, personifying its shared energy and history, with her own comprehensive musical experience. In this way, they play with the life cycle of the composition and personalize it in relation to the ensemble. This means that each performance led by a new guest conductor, in accordance with their musical affinities, creates a new variant of the tape part in the score. The ZKM space will certainly be a challenging place for the interweaving of electronics and live ensemble performance, as much in the case of two local composers as in the case of the first performance of Chaya Czernowin’s piece.