 DUO FLORIAN KITT - RITA MEDJIMOREC |
| Saturday 1/11 2003 16.00, Norrtullskolans aula Växjö | |
| Music for cello and piano by Toru Takemitsu, Kurt Estermann, Gerd Kühr, Benjamin Britten |
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FLORIAN KITT
Austrian cellist, completed his studies with Gaspar Cassado and André Navarra in Detmold after graduating from the Vienna Musikinterpretative akademie as a pupil of Frieda Litschaur.
Following his debut at the Konzerthaus in Vienna 1964 he has appeared as soloist with many leading orchestras and conductors, given cello recitals and made numerous recordings. These engagemensts took him to most of the European countries, North- and South-America, the Near East and Australia.
Most successful were always his performances of more recent works - Györgi Ligeti´s cello concerto at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Berio´s with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Diego Masson brought raving acclaim by press and the public, Luciano Berio´s concerto "Ritorno degli Snovidenia" in Rome, Nigel Osborne´s concertos, both dedicated to Florian Kitt were successful all over the world. | 
Florian Kitt and Rita Medjimorec
| Florian Kitt is also a very devoted teacher, apart from various masterclasses he holds a professorship at the University for Music in Graz since 1970. In addition to his extensive repertoire of established classic and romantic works, his especial feeling for contemporary music has inspired many major composers to dedicate works to him.
RITA MEDJIMOREC
Graduated from the Hochschule Mozarteum in Salzburg, receiving highest distinctions for both her teaching and soloist diplomas.
Since 1973 she was leading a course for specially talented children at the Musikhochschule in Graz, where she was also coaching students as an accompanist. From 1990 onwards she has been performing the same obligations as an accompanist at the University for Music in Vienna.
Her preferences in her career as a pianist are situated very much in chambermusic (duo with the cellist Florian Kitt), as partner in a piano-duo (with her husband Heinz Medjimorec) and as accompanist for singers in lieder-recitals.
International engagements took her to most European countries, the US and the Middle-East. Recordings, television and coaching in chamber-music courses complete the picture of her activities as a musician.
Since the early nineties she has given prèmiere to a number of works that have been written by contemporary Austrian composers specially for the abilities of the duo Florian Kitt - Rita Medjimorec.
CONCERT PROGRAMME
TORU TAKEMITSU
Orion (1984 for Florian Kitt)
Born in Tokyo, combined elements attached to far eastern traditions as well as avantgarde means and techniques of expression in his form of writing. He composed works not only for the conventional European formations and electronic media, but also for the traditional instruments of his home country. His main concern as a composer he considered ´to give sense to the flow of sounds that penetrates our world´. Whereby Takemitsu does not try to ´impress´ the listener, highly structured, his music reveals itself not in the usual dynamic development, but in a more contemplative, meditative access. So it seems that in Orion for cello and piano time stands still.
The title of this composition, which has been commissioned by the ORF, initiated by Florian Kitt, relates itself to the astrological sign as well as to a similar Japanese letter, which at the same time stands for the governess of the sea in Japanese mythology: eternal change but yet invariability.
Without any ´dramatic´ development Takemitsu composes a sequence of lyrical elements on a free tonal basis. Microtones and glissandi intesify the melodic line, utmost concentration shows itself in the subtle and highly differenciated lyricism.
KURT ESTERMANN (1960)
Cello and Piano (1998 for Florian Kitt and Rita Medjimorec)
Kurt ESTERMANN, organist of the convent of Wilten in Innsbruck presently occupies a guest-professorship for composition in the department of sacred music at the University ´Mozarteum´ in Salzburg. Highly distinguished and decorated his main favours are consequence and sensibility in the act of creativity, which one may realise in the continuous, irresistible, almost monumentally rising development of the rather extensively spaced first movement of this work. The two instruments, differently to the functions of solo and accompaniment, are united in a virtually symphonic setting, thereby creating a widening polyphonic sound-tape. The continual progressive extension of the basic ideas takes place with absolute consequence.
The following three movements of the work are decreasing in length and compositional density according to their sequence - the second one beeing a more relaxed, virtuosic Capriccio as contrasting chamber-music with a slight Tyrolean touch. In the Adagio a wonderfully expressive melody of the cello ascends over an ostinato of bells resounding from far away, whilst the fourth and last movement is dominated by pronounced rhytmical features.
GERD KÜHR (1952)
Portraits, eight musical gestures for violoncello and piano
(1993 for Florian Kitt and Rita Medjimorec)
Gerd KÜHR, born in Maria Luggau in Carinthia/Austria is one of the most important musical dramatists of this country. Educated at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and by Hans Werner Henze, the drama is also present in his symphonic works, which does not manifest itself by sheer loudness - one of the foremost virtues of a well thought out and functioning musical dramaturgy is especially to place climaxes as sparingly as possible, integrated into an ingenious construction.
Sparing in expenditure, but striking in their dramatism are also his Potraits, eight musical gestures for violoncello and piano, composed to characters from the collection ´Der Ohrenzeuge´ (´the earwitness´) by Elias Canetti - almost surrealistic human visions, equipped withe a very special kind of humour which stimulated musical images in Kühr´s mind. Although, according to his own description the pieces became more and more independent from their sources of association during the processs of composition, they are mainly characterised by sudden impulses and fractures, fleetingness of gesture - he calls them: musical line-drawings.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Sonata in C Op.65 (1960)
It was not Benjamin BRITTEN´s way to write music in the abstract; there was always some personal commitment behind each work. This time it was Mstislav Rostropovich, whom he had met in London at the British premiere of Shostakovich´s cello-concerto where he had been the solist, whose warm spirit and immense prowess on the instrument stimulated the composer in a new way.
The Sonata in C was then written already in the same year 1960 - it consists of five short movements whose spare epigrammatic style anticipates that of parts of the much larger-scale work Britten completed later in 1961, the War Requiem.
Economy of material - in the scherzo pizzicato and in the sparse texture of the bizarre march - makes the sonata less assertively brillant than Britten´s earlier instrumental works, as if, more than before, virtuosity was less important than deeper musical concerns. |
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