Date
Copresented with The Andy Warhol Museum and Chamber Music Pittsburgh
For their MOTE performance, the legendary purveyors of contemporary music will present György Kurtag's Officium Breve, Luciano Berio's Sequenza XI for guitar, Iannis Xenakis' Tetras, David Felder's Netivot for quartet with electronics, and Hilda Paredes' Son dementes cuerdas.
The Arditti Quartet enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on 20th century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history. World premieres of quartets by composers such as Abrahamsen, Ades, Andriessen, Aperghis, Birtwistle, Britten, Cage, Carter, Denisov, Dillon, Dufourt, Dusapin, Fedele, Ferneyhough, Francesconi, Gubaidulina, Guerrero, Harvey, Hosokawa, Kagel, Kurtag, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Maderna, Manoury, Nancarrow, Reynolds, Rihm, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Stockhausen and Xenakis and hundreds more show the wide range of music in the Arditti Quartet’s repertoire. The ensemble believes that close collaboration with composers is vital to the process of interpreting modern music and therefore attempts to work with every composer it plays. The players’ commitment to educational work is indicated by their masterclasses and workshops for young performers and composers all over the world. Over the past 30 years, the ensemble has received many prizes for its work. They have won the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis several times and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 (Elliott Carter) and 2002 (Harrison Birtwistle). In 2004 they were awarded the 'Coup de Coeur' prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for their exceptional contribution to the dissemination of contemporary music. The prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to them in 1999 for ‘lifetime achievement’ in music. They remain to this day, the only ensemble ever to receive it.
Guitarist Eliot Fisk is known worldwide as a charismatic performer famed for his adventurous and virtuosic repertoire. He is also celebrated for his willingness to take art music into unusual venues (including schools, senior centers, logging camps and prisons). After 45 years before the public he remains as his mentor Andres Segovia once wrote, “at the top line of our artistic world.” In the 2016-17 season Fisk continues to break new ground for the guitar with marathon performances of his transcriptions of all 6 Bach solo cello Suites at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and a new quintet for guitar and strings being composed for Fisk and the famed Arditti String Quartet by eminent German composer Wolfgang Rihm to be featured in multiples performances on two continents starting in 2017. Eliot Fisk has performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony, and numerous other prominent orchestras around the world. Fisk has also performed with a dizzying array of chamber music colleagues including flutist, Paula Robison; clarinetist, Richard Stoltzman; cellist Yehuda Hanani; the late violinist Ruggiero Ricci; the Shanghai, Juilliard, Miro, Borromeo and Miro String Quartets. He has invented numerous cross over projects with among others Paco Pena (flamenco guitar); Joe Pass and Bill Frisell (jazz guitar) chanteuse Ute Lemper and Turkish music specialist Burhan Oecal. The repertoire of the classical guitar has been transformed through Fisk’s innumerable transcriptions (including works by Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Paganini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Granados, Albeniz and many others). In addition, numerous new works have been dedicated to him by composers as varied as Luciano Berio, Leonardo Balada, Robert Beaser, Nicholas Maw, George Rochberg, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Kurt Schwertsik.
Tickets in advance: general admission is $15; students and seniors are $10. At the door: general admission is $20; non-Pitt students and seniors are $15. (No free student tickets at the Warhol.) Call 412-624-7529 or visit music.pitt.edu/tickets.