The Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair
Kaija Saariaho
2011–2012 Composer’s Chair
Across a crowded contemporary musical landscape, Kaija Saariaho—Carnegie Hall’s 2011–2012 composer-in-residence—stands apart with her sensual, expansive soundscapes.
Top performers from Saariaho’s native Finland—Avanti! Chamber Orchestra and soprano Karita Mattila—reveal the color and variety of her orchestral and vocal writing, while also introducing New York City audiences to works by composers whom Saariaho admires. French vocal ensemble Solistes XXI performs Saariaho’s lesser known—but equally beautiful—choral music, set to a multimedia installation by video artist Jean-Baptiste Barrière. And The Cleveland Orchestra gives the New York premiere of her atmospheric Laterna magica. Young composers benefit from Saariaho’s insight when she leads a Professional Training Workshop with Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen on writing for strings.
Brad Mehldau
2010–2011 Composer’s Chair
Sensuous, cerebral, and incandescent, the music of pianist-composer Brad Mehldau—the first jazz artist to hold The Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair—embodies what he calls art’s “mystical ability to raise up the everyday experience of life and transfigure it, give it beauty.”
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Louis Andriessen
2009–2010 Composer’s Chair
© Carnegie Hall, 2009
Carnegie Hall is honored to have Louis Andriessen as its 2009–2010 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair. Throughout the season, concertgoers will become familiar with the composer through performances of his works and other special programming.
Born in 1939 into a family of Dutch composers, Andriessen first studied with his father, and later with Luciano Berio, before launching his public career in the late 1960s. Drawing on a background in both jazz and avant-garde composition, Andriessen’s music has been regarded as a revolt against the legacy of German Romanticism. In Andriessen’s own words, his works can be “narrative, they can be anecdotes … [or] sound hallucinations.”
His 1974 De Staat—described by composer Elmer Schönberger as a mixture of “American minimalism and Dutch earthiness”—launched a new direction in post-war European music that influenced younger composers such as Steve Martland, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe.
In April and May, Carnegie Hall explores Andriessen and his artistry with a number of events—including a special Making Music concert that features the composer in conversation with Director of Artistic Planning, Jeremy Geffen; the New York premiere of Andriessen’s opera La Commedia, performed in concert; and Three Naughty Boys and Three Crazy Girls, a series of late-night improvisatory concerts, curated by Andriessen for Carnegie Hall.
Elliott Carter
2008–2009 Composer’s Chair
To help make Carnegie Hall’s mission a reality, we invite the leading composers of our day to serve as the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair. This season we honor Elliott Carter in his 100th year. Hailed by filmmaker Frank Scheffer as the “Mozart of our time,” Carter is perhaps the most important living American composer. Carnegie Hall celebrates this living legend as he assumes the Debs Composer’s Chair. James Levine and the Boston Symphony, with Daniel Barenboim at the piano, will perform the New York premiere of Carter’s Interventions on the composer’s birthday. Two programs in Zankel Hall are devoted exclusively to Carter’s music—a Making Music concert featuring the New York premiere of Mosaic and film interludes from Scheffer’s documentary A Labyrinth of Time as well as a chamber recital with Daniel Barenboim and members of the Staatskapelle Berlin—and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard offers a program juxtaposing Carter’s music with Bach’s. Other highlights include Carter’s First Symphony, performed by Orpheus (part of Orpheus’s series at Carnegie Hall; details to be announced), Réflexions performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez, and In the Distances of Sleep by The MET Chamber Ensemble with James Levine.
Get inside the music of Elliott Carter at Sound Insights ›