GUSTAV - LEAVE THE CITY
by Hannah Menne
Leaving Manhattan for Brooklyn - wandering around randomly in the city. Leaving the city after a long day of work, flowing into the subway stream - my gaze falls on the seats on the other side of the car, and then is almost forced to fall on all the faces lined up across from of me. I'm trying to sneak into the soul of the strangers by secretly yet obstinately staring at one and then another person. Nearly everyone is drifting away with their eyes closed, listening to music, then awakening with a certain instinct to get off at the right stop in the last minute.
The street artists and other revolutionaries I pass by stay in my memory as a brief flash, producing endless tiny and ever-changing sound bites that deeply impact my senses. Inadvertently, they become actors in the song "Verlass die Stadt" ("Leave the City") by Eva Jantschitsch a.k.a. "Gustav," which I am listening to while crossing the urban landscape. Suddenly the multiple impressions I've been soaking up since coming here match up with this unique composition created on the other side of the ocean...
This spring, Eva Jantschitsch, a multitalented and multilingual singer, musician, and composer from Vienna, Austria, will be on a tour through Europe and North and Central America. Two concerts will take place in New York, one of them at the Austrian Cultural Forum on May 26.
Her debut album, Rettet die Wale (Save the Whales), made a big impact on Austria a couple of years ago. Hers is a unique kind of socio-critical indie-pop, enhanced by her poetically dragging voice that reminds us a little of Björk's and words where black and white come together within seconds create colorful, twisty, and ironic ballads. Her voice is paired with a wide range of instruments and a computer. Traditional Austrian folk music takes on an elegiac brassy tune, while mysterious jazzy sections intertwine in an incredibly natural way...
Gustav is never frightened to seduce or be seduced within fractions of a second. A truly recommendable listening sensation.
TUESDAY MAY 26, 7:30 PM
CONCERT
GUSTAV - Eva Jantschitsch and Band
ACFNY
THOMAS LARCHER
MOMENTS OF DECEPTIVE PEACE
Born in Innsbruck in 1963, composer and pianist Thomas Larcher grew up in the Austrian Tyrol. He was introduced to music in his parental home. His mother would have liked to have become a musician, and consequently her three children all studied an instrument. After studying piano and composition in Vienna, he embarked on a career combining composition, performing, teaching and festival management.
Thomas Larcher's compositions take an immediate hold on the listener. Notable for their quality of invention, confidence, momentum, and directness of expression, his works have been described as occupying a new middle ground in the contemporary music scene, somewhere between the complexity of the avant-garde and the newer wave of simplicity. Larcher describes elements in his compositions as the "adherence to specific (key) notes... in an energetic, straining-at-the-leash rhythmic movement
that whips things up to obsessive speeds, and moments of exhausted, deceptive peace".
Thomas Larcher was already well known as a pianist in the area of classical, primarily contemporary music, during his studies. In this capacity, he played with important orchestras and conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Dennis Russell Davies and Franz Welser-Möst. His love of new music led him to found and manage the Klangspuren Festival (1994-2003) and the Musik im Riesen Festival (since 2004).
As a pianist, Larcher considers the opportunity to delve into the world of another composer as the most intensive possibility. He finds that there is no better way to so precisely and assiduously immerse oneself in a work and in the cosmos of another composer, with all his limitations and strengths, than to play one of his pieces: "I think that is very interesting and have also already learned a lot from it as a composer."
In the last few years Thomas Larcher has begun to place more emphasis on his role as a composer. Works have thus been composed for the London Sinfonietta, the Artemis Quartet, Heinrich Schiff, Matthias Goerne and Till Fellner, as well as works commissioned for, among others, the Lucerne Festival, the South Bank Centre in London, and the Zaterdagsmatineen (Saturday matinees) in Amsterdam.
TUESDAY MAY 5, 7:30 PM
CONCERT | ACF COMPOSER SERIES
With Thomas Larcher
ACFNY
