DuoFest: LA’s Most Fearless Fusions
Jul 8-jul 15
Introducing DuoFest! For the first time, Boston Court reimagines its summer music series as a weeklong festival, featuring collaborations from some of LA’s most exciting contemporary performers. Each evening will feature two or more artists, performing separately and together, showcasing new or rarely performed work. DuoFest celebrates collaboration in unexpected and adventurous ways, like only Boston Court can.
Night 8: Ludwig van
Saturday, July 15 @ 8pm
All festival artists return to the Main Stage to join together for the DuoFest finale of Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van, a rarely-performed homage to Beethoven. Never performed the same way twice, this musical extravaganza will reconvene DuoFest musicians, a myriad of other musical performers (including a DJ), and excerpts from the eponymous film. A once-in-a-lifetime event, not to be missed!
Program
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- Beethoven – Nine Variations on a March by Dressler
- Beethoven – Für Elise
- John Corigliano – Fantasia on an Ostinato
- Erik Carlson – Beethoven’s Eroica: opening chords
- Clarence Barlow – Für Luise
- Clarence Barlow – Yesterday’s Moonshine
- Mauricio Kagel – Ludwig Van
The Argentinean-born German composer, Mauricio Kagel, was born from a Jewish family with both Russian and German origins. His family name Kagel (adopted by his grandfather), has German origins, and also a small town near Berlin is called so. He took private lessons of singing, orchestra conducting, piano, violoncello, organ, among also with Alberto Ginastera and Paz. His father gave him the first musical lessons but his first piano teacher was Vincenzo Scaramuzza, a pianist from Crotone, of whom, Mauricio Kagel, would keep a fervent souvenir for the rest of his life. At the university of Buenos Aires he studied with other teachers philosophy and literature, among them was also Jorge Luis Borges. He joined the Agrupacion Nueva Musica of Buenos Aires at the age of only 16 years old.
In 1950, Mauricio Kagel’s his first composition has been published, Palimpsestos, for an a-capella mixed choir and also Dos Piezas Para Orchestra. In 1950 he became the co-founder of the Cinematheque Argentine. In 1954 he founded the Colon Theatre’s orchestra in Buenos Aires. Collaborating with the periodical Nueva Vision he started getting interested in photography and cinema.
Mauricio Kagel also made films, with one of the best known being Ludwig van (1970), a critical interrogation of the uses of L.v. Beethoven’s music made during the bicentenary of that composer’s birth. In it, a reproduction of L.v. Beethoven’s studio is seen, as part of a fictive visit of the Beethoven House in Bonn. Everything in it is papered with sheet music of L.v. Beethoven’s pieces. The soundtrack of the film is a piano playing the music as it appears in each shot. Because the music has been wrapped around curves and edges, it is somewhat distorted, but Beethovenian motifs can still be heard. In other parts, the film contains parodies of radio or TV broadcasts connected with the “Beethoven Year 1770”. Kagel later turned the film into a piece of sheet music itself which could be performed in a concert without the film – the score consists of close-ups of various areas of the studio, which are to be interpreted by the performing pianist.
