Image courtesy of National Arts Centre
SPHERE
WolfGANG Session
Ottawa, Ontario
Presented by
National Arts Centre
Wolfgang invites you to take another walk on the wild side with this Session, featuring stellar NACO musicians in an intimate evening of exciting music about the Earth at Club SAW.
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Spectra is an ecosystem of musical materials that are carried and passed from performer to performer, with sounds growing in and out of each other and being transformed in the process. A spiracle is an external breathing hole found on a wide range of insects, spiders, dolphins, and whales. While that might not be an obvious theme for an orchestral piece, Norwegian composer Kristine Tjørgersen likes to “give something to the audience, to bring them to a different place they didn’t think about before, so they can be surprised.” Her Spiracle for brass quintet opens space for all kinds of strange and beautiful musical impulses. R. Murray Schafer, the late, great Canadian “composer, writer, and acoustic ecologist” (cbc.ca), was a ground breaker who popularized the concept of “soundscape.” His Waves is a mysterious yet grounding work inspired by “sea time”—the six to eleven seconds that almost always elapse between waves, whether they are gentle murmurs of calm, or wild, forceful seas.
This concert is presented as part of the NAC Orchestra’s SPHERE Festival.
The event will be also be livestreamed to audiences with no tickets required.
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir (b. 1977) is an Icelandic composer whose “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (The New York Times) and “striking” (The Guardian) sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Her music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material and tends to evoke “a sense of place and personality” (The New York Times) through a distinctive “combination of power and intimacy” (Gramophone). “Never less than fascinating,” according to Gramophone Magazine, it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, in particular structural ones, like proportion and flow.
Anna’s music is widely performed internationally and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras, ensembles, and arts organizations. Portrait concerts with her music have been featured at several major venues and music festivals. Her works have been nominated and awarded on many occasions—most notably, her “confident and distinctive handling of the orchestra” (Gramophone) has garnered her the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize, the New York Philharmonic’s Kravis Emerging Composer Award, and Lincoln Center’s Emerging Artist Award and Martin E. Segal Award.
Anna is currently based in the London area. She regularly teaches and gives presentations on composition, in academic settings, as part of residencies, and in private lessons. She is currently Composer-in-Residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Anna holds a Ph.D. from the University of California in San Diego.
Kristine Tjøgersen (b. 1982 in Oslo, Norway) studied composition with prof. Carola Bauckholt at the Anton Bruckner Universität in Linz, Austria, and clarinet with prof. Hans Christian Bræin at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo.
Her works have been performed by a.o. Arditti Quartet (UK), SWR Symphonieorchester (DE), WDR Symphonieorchester, Ensemble Recherche (DE), Ensemble Aventure (DE), Plus-Minus Ensemble (UK), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (UK), Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK), asamisimasa, Ensemble neoN, BIT-20 Ensemble, Tøyen Fil og Klafferi, Oslo Sinfonietta, Cikada Ensemble, Pinquins, Bruckner Orchester Linz (AT), El Perro Andaluz (DE,), YXUS (ES) and Mimitabu (SE) at festivals like ECLAT, Musik21 (DE), Tectonics (UK), Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (DE), KLANG (DK), Borealis (NO), Cycle Festival (IS), Only Connect festival (NO), Music@VillaRomana (IT), Südseite nachts (DE), Ultima festival (NO), Nordic Music Days (FI/NO) and North Atlantic Flux (UK).
She was representing Norway at Rostrum for composers in Hungary in 2018, and at the World Music Days i Tallinn i 2019. In 2019/2020 she was a fellow at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and in 2020 she won the Arne Nordheim composer price. In 2020 she won the Pauline Hall prize for her orchestra piece Bioluminescence, and in 2021 she was awarded with “work of the year” from the Norwegian Society of Composers for her Piano Concerto. In 2022 she won the International Rostrum of Composers in Palermo with her orchestra piece Between Trees.
As clariettist she has performed at many of the major European new music festivals with the award winning ensembles Ensemble neoN, Tøyen Fil og Klafferi and asamisimasa. Tjøgersen has a special interest for music that combines sound and visuals and investigates and explores how they interact with each other.
