NYKY En­semble & Klang­fo­rum Wien

The Austrian contemporary music ensemble Klangforum Wien gives two concerts at this year’s Musica Nova Helsinki festival. The ensemble’s visit concludes with a performance of Helmut Lachenmann’s Concertini together with the Sibelius Academy’s NYKY Ensemble on Thursday 9 March 2023.

Throughout the academic year, students of NYKY Ensemble have been working on Lachenmann’s Concertini, coached by musicians from Klangforum Wien. The composer says that the title of the work (Concertini, which roughly translates to “small concertos”) is intentionally misleading. Although the work includes soloistic opportunities for tuba, guitar, harp and others, Concertini constitutes a scraping concerto, solos for spatial movement, resonance and rhythmic pattern, for example. In this piece, the 27-player orchestra is divided into 6 parts on stage and behind the audience. In addition to their own instruments, in Concertini the musicians get the chance to play singing bowls and their note stands, among others. In this performance of the piece, half of the musicians are students of NYKY Ensemble and half are members of Klangforum Wien.

Founded in 1985, Klangforum Wien is one of the most prominent international contemporary music ensembles. The collaboration between Sibelius Academy and Klangforum Wien began in the spring of 2021 when musicians from Klangforum Wien visited Helsinki to coach and perform Georg Friedrich Haas’ work in vain with NYKY Ensemble.

The ongoing cooperation of NYKY Ensemble with Klangforum Wien is part of the International Visitor Programme launched at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki in 2019. It complements the regular bachelor’s and master’s studies offered by the Sibelius Academy by inviting artists who represent the highest talent level of their respective fields to come and teach in Finland. The distinguished visiting artists work alongside students and teachers at the Sibelius Academy mainly for periods of one year or two years at a time.

The International Visitor Programme of the Sibelius Academy has been supported by the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation and Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation.

”From the beginning, I have been concerned not just with noisiness and alienation but with transformation and revelation, with real consonance in the widest sense, so that rhythm, gesture, melody, intervals, harmony – every sound and everything sounding is illuminated by its changed context.”
– Helmut Lachenmann on Concertini, 2005