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8:00 PM

Sonic Morphology - Perspectives on Contemporary German Music from Within and Without

New Music Concert|with Duo Tesserae (Alwyn Tomas Westbrooke, violin and Michiko Saiki, piano)

  • Goethe-Institut Boston, Boston, MA

  • Tickets at the door

Duo Tesserae Qu (c) Duo Tesserae

Duo Tesserae (c) Duo Tesserae

Violinist Alwyn Tomas Westbrooke and pianist Michiko Saiki (Duo Tesserae) present a program that brings rarely heard voices from eastern Germany into dialogue with international contemporaries. The concert features Rebecca Saunders’ Duo (1996/99), Thuon Burtevitz’s Rabba in Sard… (2004, rev. 2015), Wilfried Krätzschmar’s Neun Späte Bagatellen (2009), and Eric Wubbels’ the children of fire come looking for fire (2012).

By juxtaposing the finely wrought, if contrasting, sound worlds of Burtevitz and Krätzschmar with the visceral intensity of Saunders and the intricate rhythmic architecture of Wubbels, Duo Tesserae highlights the breadth of contemporary music today. The program not only raises the profile of underrepresented East German composers, but also reflects Germany’s role as a focal point for new music, as exemplified by Saunders’ Berlin-based career and Wubbels’ recipt of the 2023 Ernst von Siemens Composers' Prize.

This meeting of German traditions and international perspectives invites audiences into a landscape of striking contrasts and resonances — a vibrant encounter with the aesthetic diversity of today’s music. Precision, clarity, and color — hallmarks of Duo Tesserae’s playing — shape the concert’s approach, creating a vibrant encounter between different compositional voices and traditions.

Program:

Thuon Burtevitz Rabba in Sard… via Violin and prepared Piano (2004 rev. 2015) 15’

Wilfried Krätzschmar Neun Späte Bagatellen ("bagatelles sur le tard“) for Violin and Piano (2009) 15’

Rebecca Saunders Duo (1996/99) 12’

Eric Wubbels the children of fire come looking for fire (2012) 25’
 

  • Alwyn Tomas Westbrooke

    New Zealand-born Alwyn Tomas Westbrooke has devoted himself to innovative forms of sound and performance for many years as a violinist, composer and conductor. He is co-founder of the new-music ensemble Tema (Karlsruhe), the El Perro Andaluz ensemble (Dresden), specializing in experimental concert, media, and theater formats, and the Polytheistic Ensemble (Karlsruhe), a crossover formation mixing contemporary art music, jazz, and rock. Since 2010, he has also been the violinist in the Ensemble Phorminx (Tübingen). His concertising has taken him to Korea, Italy, Slovenia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and Switzerland.

    As a performer, Westbrooke derives particular inspiration from the collaboration with living composers, and he has worked with renowned composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Rebecca Saunders, Brian Ferneyhough, Sofia Gubaidulina, Wolfgang Rihm, Hanna Eimermacher, Heinz Holliger, Isabel Mundry, Simon Steen-Andersen, Georg Friedrich Haas and Johannes Kreidler.
    As a composer, his work spans film music, pieces for orchestra and electronics, music for diverse chamber forces, vocal music and music theater. His works have been performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO), Ensemble Sorpresa, and the Saguaro Trio, among others.

    Westbrooke is a lecturer in the performance practice of contemporary music and deputy director of the masters’ program in contemporary music performance at the Hochschule für Musik Dresden, and also teaches music theory and organology at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe.

     

  • Michiko Saiki

    Dr. Michiko Saiki is a Japanese-born pianist and  multimedia artist based in Leipzig, Germany. She is deeply committed to contemporary music and living composers, and her artistic work explores the genre of the “vocalizing pianist”– where voice, body and gender become integral components of performance.

    Since relocating to Leipzig in 2016, Michiko has been developing her ongoing multimedia music-theater project, Voices of Women, in which she collaborates closely with female composers to stage intimate, feminist narratives through music, video, and performance, of which the most recent performance took place in Leipzig in 2022: a multilayered, sensually immersive production combining a minimalist stage, video projections, voice, piano, and a self-designed sculpture. Her works have been presented internationally, including as part of an artist’s residency at Royaumont Abbey (France, 2020), at the ZfGM Festival at HMT Leipzig (2018), and the Berlin concert series Unerhörte Musik (2018), as well as in museum and lecture-concert settings in Turkey, the UK, and the USA.

    Since October 2024, she has been a lecturer in the performance practice of contemporary music at the “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig. As a versatile soloist, chamber musician, improviser, and media artist, she can be heard on recordings such as A Thing Made Whole (Kairos), Turns and Tensions (NEOS), and Chamber Music (NEOS); her video works have been presented and won prizes at film festivals in the USA, Belgium, France, and Australia. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Contemporary Music with a specialization in Piano Performance and a secondary focus on Digital Media from Bowling Green State University in 2017.
     

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