December 2019
Repertoire
ARVO PÄRT: Festina Lente
ALESSANDRO MARCELLO: Oboe Concerto i Re minor (2nd mov)
MARTIN SCHERBER: Symphony No. 3 in B minor
Performers
Orquestra Simfònica Camera Musicae
Pau Roca, oboe
Christoph Schlüren, conductor
Programme notes
Listening to symphonies by this composer one might ask why he used this particular style of musical expression while avant-garde composers of his day were experimenting with both atonality and technical media and striving to “emancipate music” from all tradition (F. X. Ohnesorg: “Die Befreiung der Musik” [The Emancipation of Music]).
He began writing music when he was thirteen. Even at this age he noticed “how I was embedded in something, enveloped as it were in music, in a womb of sound. My consciousness was different to that of everyday.” These puzzling experiences led to a long quest to explore the change of consciousness which he had at first only sensed.
He began to develop a meditative approach to dealing with the inner and outer worlds, trying to build a bridge between the two. At about the age of seventeen he stumbled on the extensive works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and on writings about the theory and practice of cognition by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). From then on he tested their ideas in his own way.
Art must become necessary, must be taken to such a level that all existence and creation breathe freedom and love of mankind, which are the time to come.”
Martin Scherber (1972)
CONCERT DATES
World Premiere of the 3rd Symphony of Martin Scherber
Biography Christoph Schlüren
Born in Reutlingen in 1961, Christoph Schlüren began playing the violin at the age of ten. A few years later, without any instruction, he started composing chamber music. A journey to Pakistan, India and Nepal in 1980 expanded his musical horizons and he made the acquaintance of Ravi Shankar. In the years that followed he sought to create an integral world-music, studied indigenous and classical music traditions from all over the world, as well as popular dance forms, progressive rock, jazz-rock and fusion music, and played in a band with improvising instrumentalists.
After completing his school-leaving certificate in 1981 he made the acquaintance of Sergiu Celibidache, with whom he studied until the latter’s death in 1996. Aside from that, he also studied musicology, philosophy and the history of science at Munich University, completing a master’s degree with a thesis on musical structure in Arvo Pärt. Beginning in 1994 he worked as a music journalist and author with a special emphasis on the discovery and promotion of unknown high-quality music. In 2002, together with Musikproduktion Höflich in Munich, he founded Repertoire Explorer, a publication series of rare works in study score, for whom he continues to function as editor and adviser. In 2008, he founded the Aldilá Records label, for whom he serves as Artistic Director. He has also worked as a programming consultant for Bavarian Radio’s contemporary music series ‘Musica Viva’, the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Munich Chamber Orchestra.
While studying with Celibidache, Schlüren had begun working closely with performers, first with advanced pianists and violinists, later increasingly with chamber ensembles. Since then, chamber music has become the main focus of his work, for which he has drawn inspiration not only from his studies with Celibidache, but from his encounters and friendly exchanges with such performers as Murray Perahia, Sándor Végh, Paul Zukofsky, John-Edward Kelly and Eberhard Feltz, and with composers of the stature of Anders Eliasson, Pehr Henrik Nordgren, Karl Michael Komma and Peter Michael Hamel.
Many young soloists and chamber musicians seek his tutelage when preparing for concert appearances and recordings. Since 2010, when he founded the Symphonia Momentum chamber orchestra, he has increasingly worked as a conductor with the goal of combining valuable but unknown music with famous masterpieces, systematically and with dramatic cogency.
His overriding vision is to unearth these works without preconceptions or obeisance to interpretative ideologies, and to realise them in performance. The concluding phase of this work includes a current project that has occupied him for a good ten years: in 2008 the Sergiu Celibidache Foundation commissioned him to write the fundamental work on musical phenomenology, with special emphasis on general criteria of performance practice, that Celibidache himself always wished to write but never brought to fruition.