CANCELED — sfSoundSalonSeries: Stephane Ginsburg

THIS SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELED. WE APOLOGIZE!!!
Belgian pianist Stephane Ginsburgh presents an evening of works for a solo pianist that subtly combines music, speaking, electronics, actions and percussion into a unique musical experience. “A pianist speaking, a speaker playing the piano… Let’s invert the roles, mix them, create ambiguity : music and text are not superimposed anymore but they are tangled up, intimately mingling…”
PROGRAM
Matthew Shlomowitz – Popular Contexts 2 (2010) for piano, keyboard, voice, actions and electronic sounds
Frederic Rzewski – Stop The War! (Mile 61 from The Road, 2003)
Frederic Rzewski – Salouette (for Salomé Lou Ginsburgh, 2011)
Jean-Luc Fafchamps – Rap & Tap (2011) for speaking an tapping pianist
Vykintas Baltakas – Pasaka (1995) for piano and electronics
François Sarhan – Ô Piano (2012) for piano, voice and electronics
Matthew Shlomowitz makes incisions in the daily musical and sound world, exposing it to the listener in the offbeat conditions of the concert. In “Popular Contexts 2” it is a confrontation between the piano and the world which opens to an exploration of new ways of liestening in a given context.
Frederic Rzewski is one of the pioneers in music for speaking pianist. But is it a pianist speaking of a speaker playing the piano ? The question remains. With “De Profundis” the composer revisits the famous text written by Oscar Wilde in his prison cell to produce a true antiauthority melodrama.
“Rap & Tap” by Jean-Luc Fafchamps are two explosive miniatures written for a project assembling short pieces. Rap, dedicated to Frederic Rzewski, interlaces music to a text by James Baldwin. Tap, in the memory of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, let us hear multiple percussive sound effects performed on the piano.
The lithuanian Vykintas Baltakas uses his mother tongue and electronics. The pianist tells a story, for himself, for somebody else. Understanding is not important, what is is the desire to tell the story. The necessity. This is the tale found behind “Pasaka”.
With “Ô Piano”, François Sarhan unfolds the long and hesitating monologue of a pianist about the meaning of his musical practice. It gives birth to a characteristic body language as the pianist adresses an imaginary listener, speaks, plays, stops, and comes back upstream, ending with a question.
Stephane Ginsburgh, a musician based in Brussels, has been praised for his daring and mature piano playing. He appears regularly in recitals and chamber music worldwide. He performed at important festivals such as Agora (Paris), Ars Musica (Brussels), Festival de Wallonie, Festival van Vlaanderen, Tzlil Meudcan Festival (Tel-Aviv), Festival Transit (Leuven), Milano Musica, Festival Next Wave (New York), Festival de Marseille, Artefact Festival (Leuven), Festival Midis-Minimes (Brussels), Festival Loop (Brussels), Biennale Charleroi-Danse, Gentsche Feesten, Moscow Autumn Contemporary Music Festival and will perform in the future at festivals Piano+ ZKM (Karlsruhe), Festival Musiq3 (Brussels), Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Quincena Musical (San Sebastián), Ultima Oslo, Lincoln Center Festival (New York) …
He dedicates much of his energy to contemporary music that he plays as well as the Classical repertoire. He collaborated with many composers such as Newton Armstrong, Vykintas Baltakas, Guy Barash, Philippe Boesmans, Renaud De Putter, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, Fabian Fiorini, Panayiotis Kokoras, Pierre Kolp, Philipp Maintz, Benoît Mernier, Stefan Prins, André Ristic, Frederic Rzewski, François Sarhan, Sabrina Schroeder, Matthew Shlomowitz and Juan Carlos Tolosa, of whom he also premiered works. He regularly plays with the Ictus Ensemble under George- Elie Octors. He collaborated with choreographers such as Johanne Saunier (Joji Inc.), Anne Tersa De Keersmaeker (Rosas), Claudio Bernardo (As Palavras), Barbara Mavro (Roberta DC) and visual artists Peter Dowsnbrough and Kurt Ralske.
Stephane Ginsburgh recorded many CDs for Sub Rosa label (Feldman, Duchamp, Satie, Fafchamps) which recently published Back to… by Jean-Luc Fafchamps. He will record two pieces by David Toub for World Edition. His recording of Prokofiev’s complete piano sonatas will be published by Cypres Records.
After studying at the Conservatory, he worked with Paul Badura-Skoda, Claude Helffer, Jerome Lowenthal and Vitaly Margulis. He is a laureate of the Tenuto BRTN competition 1995 and has received the Pelemans Prize in 1999 by the Belgian composers union for his implication in performing Belgian contemporary music. In 1998, Stephane Ginsburgh co-founded SONAR (previously le Bureau des Arts), an active group of artists dedicated to different types of artistic expression and creation including music, dance and literature. His implication in concert organisation bears a strong political meaning as he insists on the necessity for artists to engage themselves into collective action. From 2010 until 2013, he was artistic director of the Centre Henri Pousseur dedicated to electronic music and live electronics. He teaches piano at the Royal Music Conservatory and at the Dalcroze Institute, both in Brussels. He studied philosophy at the Free University of Brussels and has translated Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz by Eric J. Hobsbawm into French for Aden Editions.