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Afontibus is an independent label and company for
releasing of CD recordings and performance of music established by violinist
Geir Inge Lotsberg and organist Kåre Nordstoga.
Ordering info:
You may use the secure encrypted PayPal service to place the order and
arrange for the payments from this site.
Prices:
Kr. 220,- (ATB-CD 1&2),
Kr. 165,-
(ATB-CD 3,4,5 & 9)
Kr. 300,- (ATB-CD 6-8)
plus Kr. 25 for shipping.
Would you like an other arrangements?
Send e-mail: order at afontibus.no
The Afontibus cd's are all available as single tracks or complete albums
at a.o. iTunes and Musiconline.no.
This site is designed and produced
by Play.
Fabra is a label related to Afontibus. Learn more about the
releases!
www.fabra.no
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Þhorkell Sigurbjörnsson
was born in Reykjavík in 1938. He studied the piano at the Reykjavík
College of Music. Graduate studies took him to the United States, where
he studied composition, first at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Among his theachers were R.G. Harris, Kenneth Gaburo and Lejaren Hiller.
Þhorkell attended seminars in composition at Darmstadt in Germany and Nice,
France.
Þhorkell Sigurbjörnsson is one of the best known and prolific
of Icelandic composers today and his catalog is extensive. Besides composing,
he is a theacher of therory and composition at the Reykjavík College
of Music. Þhorkell Sigurbjörnsson has appeared as a pianist,
both in concert and in recordings. He was a music critic for the Morgunblaðið
newspaper and has also been a program host the National Broadcasting Service.
From 1983-88 Þhorkell Sigurbjörnsson was president of the Society
of Icelandic Composers. On returning from abroad in 1962, Þhorkell participated
in Musica Nova, a society for the promotion and perfomance of new music,
and played an active role in the creation of modern Icelandic music culture.
Þhorkell Sigurbjörnsson´s music is extremely varied. In
his extensive catalog one finds orchestral works, solo concertos, a variety
of chamber works, electronic and computer music, solo pieces, chamber operas,
songs and choral music,-both sacred and secular. His hymns are among his
best known and most beloved works. Þorkell´s contribution to
Icelandic music life is vast. This is clearly confirmed in his output of
brilliant music, but also in his influence in many other ways. Since Þhorkell
Sigurbjörnson came home from his studies abroad, he has been the theacher
of the majority of Icelandic composers and professional musicians.
http://www.mic.is
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Isang Yun was born on September 17, 1917 near the southeastern
seaport Tongyông, at a time when the Korean peninsula was under
Japanese occupation. Yun took part in the resistence against Japan, and
in 1943, he was imprisoned and tortured. After receiving the Seoul City
Culture Award in 1955, he was able to study in Paris and Berlin from 1956
to 1959. In Berlin he studied with former Schönberg-disciple Josef
Rufer, learning how to compose "with twelve tones related only to
one another". From Germany, Yun was able to establish contact with
and was a part of the international avant-garde.
His Buddhistic oratorio Om mani padme hum met with broad resonance in
1965; the premiere of the orchestral Réak at the Donaueschingen
Festival in 1966 lead to his international breakthrough. In 1967 Yun was
abducted form Berlin to Seoul by the Korean secret police, and was tortured
and charged with high treason. In a political show trial he was sentenced
to life imprisonment in the first instance, but released in 1969 after
international protests. In 1971 he became a German citizen.
Yun taught composition at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin from 1970
to 1985, from 1974 on as a full professor. His oeuvre includes more than
a hundred works, among them four operas and a number of instrumental concertos.
In the 1980s he composed a series of five major, interrelated symphonies;
during that period Yun also developed a new tone in his chamber works,
which are characterised by the striving for harmony and peace. At the
same time, reconciliation on the Korean peninsula was his political goal.
Isang Yun died on November 3, 1995 in Berlin, and was interred in a grave
of honour provided by the City Senate (Landschaftsfriedhof Gatow). He
was a member of the Hamburg and Berlin Academies of the Arts and of the
European Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Salzburg, an honorary member
of the International Society of Contemporary Music. He also held an honorary
doctorate from the University of Tübingen, and was the recipient
of the Goethe Medal of the Goethe Institute in Munich and the Distinguished
Service Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
www.yun-gesellschaft.de
Article
in norwegian
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Hans Werner Henz was born in Gütersloh,
Westphalia, in 1926 and began composing at the age of twelve. He studied
at the Brunswick State Music School and, after military service, at the
Institute for Church Music in Heidelberg and with Wolfgang Fortner. He attended
the early Darmstadt International Summer Schools for New Music, where he
met René Leibowitz, studying serial technique with him both there
and in Paris.
Of Henze's huge catalogue of works the earliest acknowledged date from 1946:
the Kammerkonzert for piano, flute and strings, and the sonata for violin
and piano. The following year brought the first string quartet, violin concerto
and symphony.
In 1948 he produced his first opera, the one-act 'Das Wundertheater', premiered
in Heidelberg, and in 1949 his first acknowledged ballet, 'Ballett-Variationen'.
His first full-scale opera, 'Boulevard Solitude', an updating of the Manon
Lescaut story, was successfully launched in Hanover in 1952, but a year
later Henze abandoned postwar German society to settle in Italy, where he
still lives. His next opera, 'König Hirsch', and a whole series of
pieces reflect the warming influence on him of the Italian environment.
Henze memorably described himself as 'a north German contrapuntal temperament
projected into the arioso south'; and the modernist, Schoenbergian and Stravinskyan
influences of his earlier work now submitted to the tender sway of a sensuous
lyricism clearly evident in the ballet 'Ondine', the 'Fünf neapolitanische
Lieder' for baritone and chamber orchestra, the 'Nachtstücke und Arien'
for soprano and large orchestra. To this rich synthesis was added a more
austere classical strain in works such as 'Cantata della fiaba estrema'
for soprano, chamber chorus and instruments, or 'Ariosi' for soprano, violin
and orchestra; while a constructivistic approach was brought to bear on
such pieces as 'Antifone' for solo strings, wind and percussion, the cantata
'Novae de infinito laudes', and the Kleist-based opera 'Der Prinz von Homburg'.
Henze's operatic career reached a pitch of boldness and acclaim with 'The
Bassarids', a two-hour single act conceived as a four-movement symphony,
premiered in Salzburg in 1966; while his 45-minute second piano concerto
of 1967 was a peak of his more abstract writing. But with the oratorio 'Das
Floss der Medusa', and more conspicuously the 'Versuch über Schweine'
for baritone-Sprechgesang and orchestra, both of the following year, and
the exuberant, aleatory sixth symphony of 1969, a complete change came over
Henze's work.
Political protest, deep-dyed into the very fabric of the music - and indicated
by his periods of residence in Cuba - marks his output of the 1970s, as
attested by the revolutionary 'recital for four musicians' of El Cimarrón,
followed by a concerto for viola and small orchestra, entitled 'Compases',
the quasi-theatrical second violin concerto, and the 'actions for music'
'We come to the River', a stage work to a libretto by Edward Bond. Since
the appearance of this work, first performed at Covent Garden in 1976, the
political ferment of Henze's creativity has tended to subside. Revolutionary
ideals invariably lead to disillusion; but he does count the foundation
that same year of the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte - a people's arts festival
- in the Tuscan town of Montepulciano as 'one of my few political successes'.
Subsequent stage works include two other Bond collaborations, however: the
comic parable of 'The English Cat' and the ballet 'Orpheus'; and if in the
most recent two, 'Das verratene Meer' and 'Venus und Adonis', both to a
libretto by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, attention is focused on personal and psychological
experience - as it also is in the seventh symphony or the instrumental (wordless)
'Requiem' - the cantata-like Symphony No 9, 'dedicated to the heroes and
martyrs of German antifascism', is there to remind us that vehement political
protest still looms large in Henze's imagination.
After the completion of his tenth symphony he started working on his last
opera 'L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe' which was premiered
at the Salzburg Festival in summer 2003 to great international acclaim.
It resulted in many future productions, such as at Teatro Real Madrid, Opera
de Lyon, Hamburgische Staatsoper and Semperoper Dresden. In December 2005
the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam premiered the orchestral work
'Sebastian im Traum' which was followed by the opera ‘Phaedra’
premiered by Ensemble Modern, Michael Boder and Peter Mussbach at Staatsoper
Berlin in September 2007 with subsequent performances in Brussels, Frankfurt,
Vienna and Cologne.
He has received innumerable honours and was the first composer-in-residence
of the Berlin Philharmonic and has twice been composer-in-residence at the
Tanglewood Festival. Recently he has completed ‘Elogium musicum’
which was premiered on October 2 2008 with Ricardo Chailly, the Gewandhausorchester
Leipzig and the mdr choir.
© Paul Driver
http://www.hanswernerhenze.de
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(c) Schott Promotion / Christopher Peter |
Aulis Sallinen was born in 1935 in
Salmi on the northern shore of Lake Ladoga (which the Soviet Union claimed
in 1944). His early musical experience was playing the violin. Improvising
(including jazz) on the piano led him to write his first compositions as
a teenager. After studying with Aarre Merikanto and Joonas Kokkonen at the
Sibelius Academy, he joined the staff there. He was Administrator of the
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (1960-69); Secretary and member of the
Board (1958-73), then Chairman (1971-73) of the Finnish Composers' Society;
member of the board of TEOSTO (Finnish copyright society) from 1970-84,
then Chairman from 1988-90; he also served for several years on the Board
of the Finnish National Opera.
In 1983 he shared the Wihuri International Sibelius prize with Penderecki.
He is a member of the Royal Swedish Music Academy and Honorary Doctor of
the Universities of Helsinki and Turku. The Finnish Government made him
Professor of Arts for life in 1981 - the first appointment of its kind,
thus making it possible for him to devote all of his time to composing.
His extensive catalogue of compositions includes eight acclaimed and distinctive
symphonies, the latest of which was premiered by the Concertgebouw Orchestra
in April 2004. In addition, he has written some major concert works involving
voices, notably the Dies Irae (1978), an apocalyptic vision of our planet
destroyed, Songs of Life and Death (1994), an expansive expression of Sallinen's
humanitarian creed, and The Barabbas Dialogues (2003), an unconventional,
touching medititation on the Easter story.
Sallinen is one of the foremost living opera composers, and he has written
six important large-scale works in this genre, all of which have been revived
on several occasions. The Horseman (1975) and The Red Line (1978) are social
dramas rooted in Finnish culture, and played a crucial part in establishing
Finland as the world's leading exporter of contemporary opera. The King
Goes Forth To France (1983), commissioned jointly by the Savonlinna Festival,
the Royal Opera House and the BBC; and The Palace (1991-3) introduce elements
of satirical whimsy. However Kullervo (1988) and King Lear (1999), with
a libretto adapted from Shakespeare's play, are heartfelt tragedies exploring
familial relationships and the bleakest aspects of the human condition.
The success of Sallinen's operatic technique is demonstrated by the fact
that four of his operas - The Horseman, The King Goes Forth To France, Kullervo
and The Red Line - are all receiving performances across Europe as Sallinen
enters his eighth decade.
Since 2001, Aulis Sallinen has concentrated on writing works featuring solo
instruments, ranging in size from the Cello Sonata (2005) to the Horn Concerto
(2002). His latest work is an addition to his "Chamber Music"
series for a variety of soloists with string orchestra: Chamber Music VI
is scored for string quartet and string orchestra.
Sallinen's instrumental works are widely performed - indeed Some Aspects
of Peltoniemi Hintrik's Funeral March and Chamber Music III: The Nocturnal
Dances of Don Juanquixote have been established as modern classics. In 2004
the German record label CPO released the first of a series of seven all-Sallinen
CDs, featuring all of his major orchestral works.
www.fimic.fi/sallinen
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Photo: Maarit Kytöharju/Fimic 2004 |
Synne Skouen - Biography
(10/07/2002)
Synne Skouen was born in Oslo in 1950. From 1969 to 1973, she studied
at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. Her
subjects were Composition and analysis with Professors Alfred Uhl and
Erwin Ratz, and experimental composition at the academy's electronic studio
under the composers Dieter Kaufmann and Friedrich Cerha. During her period
in Vienna Skouen was also a member of the experimental music theatre group
"Die Fremden". In 1976, following studies with Professor Finn
Mortensen, she received her degree in composition from the Norwegian State
Academy of Music.
In 1977, Skouen was appointed editor of a new periodical for contemporary
music, Ballade, a position she held until 1986. She was for several years
also a music critic for Arbeiderbladet. In 1993, after many years as a
full-time composer, Skouen was appointed Music Director for Norwegian
Broadcasting's cultural channel, and in 1999 promoted to Head of Culture.
In 2002 she was elected President of the Society of Norwegian Composers.
Synne Skouen has increasingly placed her works - including her instrumental
compositions - within a dramatic context. Conceptualizing music for the
stage is, as a rule, her point of departure, and consequently influences
all aspects of the work. The majority of her works are written in a free,
atonal language, with tonality appearing and disappearing as do objects
in a plot, or characters in a drama.
Amongst her best-known works, are the full-length ballet "Volven"
(The Sibyl), in collaboration with the choreographer Kjersti Alveberg,
commissioned by The Norwegian State Opera, the piano piece "Hils
Domitila!" (Greet Dometila), the video-opera "Dusj" (Shower),
the television fable "Froskeprinsen" (The Frog Prince)",
and "ROSA" for soprano and tape, in which Alma Mahler-Werfel
plays an important role.
Synne Skouen was Festival Composer for the Festival of Northern Norway
in 1990, for which she composed the melodrama "Balladen om Anne Roggløy."
In 1991 she was the festival Composer for the Oslo Chamber Music Festival,
where her commissioned work "Une soirée d'eté",
performed by the Director of the festival, Arve Tellefsen had it's premiere.
In 1993, together with the author Cecelie Løveid and the director
Nicole Macé, Synne Skouen won the Prix Italia for the radio production
"Måkespiserne" (Gulleaters).
Synne Skuen articles in Aftenposten.
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Klaus Sandvik:
Klaus Sandvik was born in Bergen in 1966. Bachelor degree in composition from the Norwegian Academy of Music, under the inspiring tutorship of professor and master Asbjørn Schaathun. Bachelor degree in mathematics and computer studies from the University of Oslo. Jazz-composition and improvisation at Berklee College of Music, Boston, USA.
Klaus Sandvik has received commissions from The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, violinist Geir Inge Lotsberg, Oslo String Quartet, experimental percussionist Kjell Tore Innervik, Telemark Brassensemble and Fannaråken Wind Quintet.
In 2003 Sandviks composition "How Fair is Thy Face" for choir was chosen one of the three winning works at the The International Edvard Grieg Competition for Composers. In 2004 Sandvik wrote the official fanfare for the norwegian Abel-prize organisation.
Klaus Sandviks music attempts to make a substantial impact on the listener and is based upon a wide understanding of possible listening experiences. His interest for formalized structures and their intrinsic qualities are often combined with a strong intention to create an organic and at the same time challenging development. One important ingredient in his treatment of different compositional material is to constantly evaluate and monitor the energetic capasity of its sound. Another key element in his compositional process is an acute awareness of when and how musical material relates to referential musical heritage.
http://www.klaussandvik.org
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