March 14: Organ and Percussion Concert

8:00 PM  (7:15 Pre-concert talk)

Tickets in are priced as General Admission $35.00, Seniors: $30.00 and Undergrad Students: $25.00 (HST included).

Duo Zsigmond Szathmáry-Olaf Tzschoppe

Zsigmond Szathmáry was born in Hungary in 1939, and received his musical training in composition and organ at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Subsequent studies led him to Vienna and Frankfurt. In 1960 he won first prize at the Budapest Organ Competition. In 1972 he received the Bach Prize Scholarship of the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg. He was active as an organist in Hamburg and at the Bremen Cathedral. After teaching at the Lübeck and Hannover Colleges of Music, he was appointed professor at the State College of Music in Freiburg in 1978. Szathmáry has given numerous courses as guest lecturer at colleges of music and universities in Europe, the USA, Japan, and Korea. He is an instructor at the Summer Academy for organists in Haarlem, Holland, and teaches at the Darmstadt “Ferienkurse für Neue Musik.” Szathmáry has undertaken extended concert tours and made numerous recordings. As a composer, he has mostly written chamber music.

Olaf Tzschoppe was born in Kiel, Germany. He studied percussion in Freiburg (Germany) and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA), with a scholarship from the DAAD. His artistic interest is the solo repertoire and the chamber music of the 20^th and 21^st century, with a main focus on the repertoire for organ and percussion and the interdisciplinary collaboration with other arts. Tzschoppe is a member of the worldwide known Soloist-Ensemble Les Percussions de Strasbourg and of the Ensemble for contemporary music SurPlus, Freiburg. He is touring regularly Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa. He appears with the turkish percussionist Murat Coskun and is also giving concerts with improvised music. Besides frequent concerts as a soloist Tzschoppe has played with the MusikFabrik, Köln, the Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt, and the Klangforum, Wien, and in different chamber music formations. He is currently Professor for Percussion and Chamber music at the University of the Arts, Bremen.

Artistic statement: Even if the time of the aesthetics of inspiration is passé, composers have remained imaginative to the present day. Above all the period starting in the 1960s has seen an impressive array of the most diverse sound producing devices and, on top of that, in the most unusual combinations. Combining the diverse and dynamic percussion instrumentarium with the organ is also one of the ideas that arose only after the middle of the last century in the course of the search for unheard-of sounds. The Düsseldorf composer Günter Becker, for example, wrote his Meteoron for organ, percussion, and recording tape (1969) for the 3rd “Week of Sacred Music in Kassel.” But these remained one-off occurrences, which was certainly because of the dissimilarity of these instruments: here the mighty, inflexible organ that additionally carries the burden of clerical gravity; there percussion, which only since Edgard Varèse has found increasing use in art music – to the present day, this combination appears only infrequently.

Olaf Tzschoppe and Zsigmond Szathmáry have both experimented for a long time with this unusual formation. Since 2005, they have appeared as a duo and have premiered many new works for organ and percussion, including surround sound compositions like 2 II by Andreas Paparousos or compositions with live electronics and/or tape. Of course, the aforementioned Meteoron by Günter Becker is not missing from their repertoire. In 2011 Edition Zeitklang released the CD entgrenzt-unbounded which features works by Annette Schlünz, Dániel Péter Biró, Roland Breitenfeld, Gerald Eckert und Bernfried Pröve performed by the duo.

The concert will feature works written specifically for the duo by Andreas Paparousos, Johann Christian Schulz, Annette Schlünz and Julio Estrada as well as works composed by Olaf Tzschoppe and Zsigmond Szathmáry. The spatial distribution of sound will be a key aspect of the concert with percussion set-ups in various parts of the church.

Program

Zsigmond Scathmary – Organ
Olaf Tzschoppe – Percussion

MARCH 14TH 2015 8:00 pm 7:15 pm pre-concert talk
Church of the Holy Trinity – Toronto

All pieces are written for or by Z. Szathmáry and O. Tzschoppe