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Maria Kliegel & Albie van Schalkwyk
2018-09-28

CELLO RECITAL

28 September 2018

Odeion

19:30


WORLD-RENOWNED GERMAN VIRTUOSO CELLIST!

“She has at her disposal all the necessary attributes: a fantastically light, yet not perfectionistically moribund technique, entrancing intensity, glamorous and nonetheless endearing charisma.”- Der Tagesspiegel / Berlin

After studying with Janos Starker at Indiana University in Bloomington (USA), Maria Kliegel won, amongst others, the First Grand Prix of the Concours Rostropowitsch Paris (1981). Mstislav Rostropowitsch thereupon engaged the services of his prize winner as a soloist with the Orchestre National de France for several tours through France and invited her to his orchestra in Washington D.C. He became one of her most important mentors.

Maria Kliegel – La Cellissima – since then an artist in demand throughout the world - started an unusually successful record career on the Naxos label in 1991 alongside her stage triumphs. In this way, her recording of Dvorak's and Elgar's cello concerts with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra London has been maintaining its success as a bestseller for many years now. Frequent honours followed, including two Grammy nominations. In the meantime, Maria Kliegel leads the market in cello literature with some one million CDs sold throughout the world.

In her multimedia book and DVD project Schott Masterclass – Cello: Mit Technik und Fantasie zum künstlerischen Ausdruck about cello techniques and “famous – infamous” passages (played and analysed) published in 2006, she pursues completely new paths. This was the starting point for the production of the English version Cello – Masterclass Using Technique and Imagination to achieve Artistic Expression, released on the Naxos label in 2010.

Contemporary composers like to dedicate their works to the cellist. Wilhelm Kaiser Lindemann, for example, composed on her request Hommage á Nelson Mandela for cello and percussion. After the première of this work in Cape Town (1997), President Mandela reacted profoundly emotionally by inviting the artist to a private concert in his residence.

Since 1986 she has been professor at the Cologne Academy of Music and in 2001 established with Ida Bieler (violin) and Nina Tichman (piano) the Xyrion Trio, which undertook the artistic supervision of the Andernach Music Festival at Namedy Castle in 2007.

Maria Kliegel plays a cello made by Carlo Tononi, Venice ca. 1730.

Albie van Schalkwyk is not only a solo performer in his own right, but is also one of the leading chamber musicians and vocal accompanists in South Africa. In his distinguished career, he won both the UNISA Overseas Scholarship and first prize in the SABC Piano Competition. Besides performing as a piano soloist and with orchestras, he has given masterclasses for singers and accompanists and served as music producer and official accompanist for the SABC. In 2009 he was appointed Associate Professor in Piano and Chamber Music at the College of Music, University of Cape Town. In the same year, the South African Academy of Arts and Science awarded him the Huberte Rupert Prize for his contribution to ensemble playing and teaching. He has also been a member of several well-known SA ensembles, notably the Songmakers Guild which gives younger performers opportunities to appear in song recitals.

PROGRAMME

  • Respighi – Adagio con variazioni
  • Beethoven – Sonata for violoncello and piano No. 4 in C major, Op. 102, No. 1
  • Debussy – Sonata in D minor (1915)
  • Chopin – Sonata for violoncello and piano in G minor, Op. 65

ADMISSION

  • R140 (adults)
  • *R100 (pensioners)
  • *R80 (UFS staff)
  • *R60 (students, learners and block bookings of 10+)

Tickets available at Computicket or online at http://online.computicket.com/web/

*Please note that tickets for pensioners, students, learners and UFS staff can only be purchased at a Computicket outlet (Shoprite Checkers) or at the doors since a valid card or ID has to be presented to qualify for the above-mentioned discount.

ENQUIRIES
Ninette Pretorius (tel. 051 401 2504)


Back
CHOPIN IN AFRICA – Warsaw to Bloemfontein

Lunch Hour Concert

15 November

13:00

Odeion


Ensemble from POLAND:

Maria Pomianowska ~Katarzyna Gacek-Duda ~ Gwidon Modest Cybulski

Karolina Matuszkiewicz ~ Wojciech Lubertowicz

together with

Nicol Viljoen (piano) & Chris van Zyl (cello)

Entrance Free

We can promise you this: you haven’t heard anything like it. Unless, that is, you’ve written an ethnomusicology dissertation on Polish folk music or have access to a functioning time machine.

Alexander Varty: Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly

Maria Pomianowska (Professor of Folk Music at the prestigious Kraków Academy of Music in Poland) and her a quintet of fellow musicians will present a lunch hour concert at the Odeion School of Music on 15 November at the Odeion. This concert is entitled Chopin On 5 Continents – Africa. Pomianowska and her ensemble will join forces with Prof Nicol Viljoen (pianist) and cellist Chris van Zyl (BMus Performance) studying under the tutelage of Prof Anmari van der Westhuizen.

Pomianowska and her ensemble will mainly play on string folk music instruments known as sukas. Aesthetically and proportionally a suka closely resembles an ancient violin, but is played vertically like a cello and positioned on the lap.

Pomianowska literally revived the suka from obsolescence with only a dusty painting as the as a point of reference. She was curious to research the connection between her Polish heritage with the South and Central Asian instruments she was studying as part of her own ethnomusicological research.

Pomianowska remarked: “I reconstructed the instrument and rediscovered the performance technique in collaboration with the musicologist Ewa Dahlig-Turek and the late luthier Andrzej Kuczkowski. “We reconstructed the instrument, which had not existed for 100 years in our culture. The last generation of suka musicians became extinct during the beginning of the 20th century, and the only information we had available was from ethnographical sources.”

The suka is played with a bow, and by stopping the strings with the nails - not the fleshy pads - of the left hand fingers. It is a seemingly awkward technique, but one that Pomianowska says produces a uniquely vocal timbre.

It is not enough to play Chopin’s music as written, Pomianowska contends, noting that her famous countryman was also renowned as an improviser. “We want to share with him that creation moment,” she says, “to connect on these different levels of emotion and imagination.”

So what does this have to do with Frédéric Chopin? The Warsaw-born, Paris-trained, composer was a keen student of folk music, and almost certainly heard the suka during summer vacations in his native land. Unlike later musicologist-composers Béla Bartok and Leoš Janácek, Chopin didn’t transcribe folk melodies note for note, but fragments of rural tunes appear in many of his best-loved compositions, and the mazurka was one of his compositional staples. He wrote at least 59 works for piano based on its lively barn dance beat.

She is also preparing to take Chopin far beyond his ethnic origins she has transcribed several of Chopin’s mazurkas for her touring quintet, which will be amplified by local artists, pianist Nicol Viljoen and cellist Chris van Zyl, and encapsulate the concert with a distinct South African flavour. Viljoen has a remarkable favour for the Chopin Mazurkas and gave a memorable recital in Krakow in 2015.

Pomianowska and her ensemble’s concert tour to South Africa is taking place in celebration of Poland’s membership of the UN’s security. The concert at the Odeion School of Music is positioned with the incentive to serve as a catalyst of the planned bi-lateral agreement between the Academy of Music in Kraków and the OSM, which is currently in process.

This event is fully sponsored by the Embassy of Poland in South Africa and the OSM and the University of the Free State would like to extend their gratitude to the Embassy of Poland for this initiative.

Inquiries:

Ninette Pretorius
Officer: Professional Services & Concert coordinator
Odeion School of Music
pretoriusn@ufs.ac.za

or

Marius Coetzee
Innovation & Development Manager Odeion School of Music
coetzee@ufs.ac.za

Grazyna Koornhof
Political & Economic Section
Embassy of the Republic of Poland Pretoria South Africa
grazyna.koornhof@msz.gov.pl

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