BOSTON / BERLIN

Contemporary Music Festival @ Goethe

An evening of cinematic productions of contemporary music. A sneak-peak of John Aylward’s new opera film Oblivion (Laine Rettmer, director; Stratis Minakakis, musical director) and the premiere of Julia Werntz’s Wreaths for solo violin (directed by Monica Cohen/The BOOM House). This evening highlights long-standing collaborations between these Massachusetts-based composers and Berlin-based performers, soprano Nina Guo (Oblivion) and violinist Biliana Voutchkova (Wreaths).

Composer and pianist John Aylward grew up in the Sonoran Desert on the border of Arizona and Mexico, a child of an immigrant mother from Germany (herself a World War II refugee) and in circumstances of both tremendous diversity and economic instability. His music reflects the rich expressions of converging cultural histories and the deeply interwoven communities of that earlier life, all within the otherworldly landscapes of the desert. After initial piano and composition studies with Nicholas Zumbro and Pamela Decker, John studied music composition in New England with Martin Boykan and David Rakowski and wrote a dissertation on Elliott Carter’s 5th String Quartet with musicologist Eric Chafe with the support of two residential fellowships from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland. While completing his studies, Aylward founded the Etchings Festival in Auvillar, France, which continues today in the U.S.
 
The Boston Globe has described Aylward’s music as being “delicate and deep, all at once”, and Gramophone has called Aylward’s music “mysterious, iridescent and daring”. The Canadian new music review Textura remarked that Aylward’s recent monodrama Angelus was “gripping music of a high order”, and that, “the manner by which Aylward conjoins his vocal and instrumental elements in the work sometimes calls to mind Berg’s handling of orchestration in Wozzeck and Lulu.”
 
Aylward’s recent awards and fellowships include those from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation, MacDowell, Tanglewood, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, First Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music, and many others. More about John’s music can be found at johnaylward.com
 
The music of composer Julia Werntz is rooted in a clear melodic sensibility with a highly nuanced and elastic approach to pitch and time. Her intricate microtonal and rhythmic language often communicates the irregular contours of human physicality—bodily motions, speech, and the cadences of thought—and frequently reacts to sensations from the natural world.
 
Nina Guo is a high soprano based in Berlin. She is interested in the sounds and music of recent and ongoing times. Her performance practice includes interpreting notated music, improvising, and collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. Radio and humor play large roles in her work.
 
Berlin-based Biliana Voutchkova is a dynamic, thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, violinist, composer-performer, improvisor and curator. Her work spans the widest possible range of sound, vision, movement and includes concert performances of improvisation, contemporary composition and original site specific work, exhibitions, long durational / multidisciplinary performances, audiovisual works and installation formats with focus on the interconnection between inner world and sound space.