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| About The Best Version of Myself |
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»My father is so friendly, so considerate, so funny, and so real. [...]. He’s always helped me be the best version of myself.«
Tiffany Trump
The title „The Best Version of Myself” sounds, at first glance, arrogant, self-assured and narcissistic. On closer inspection, the title reveals the thread of the compositions collected in the album that the composer and performer Mathais Monrad Møller recorded with the soloist ensemble PHØNIX 16, Sebastian Berweck, Carola Schaal and The Norwegian Radio Orchestra. For Møller, the phenomenon of narcissism is more than a pathology of our days. Especially the myth about the impossible love between Narcissus and the nymph Echo reveals important elements that characterize Møller’s work.
While Narcissus represents the dimension of the visual, the nymph Echo literally stands for the acoustic and the world of sound. As we know, echo also means reverb. Imitating and creating sounds; delay and fade-out; action-reaction – these characteristics of echoes are central strategies of singing for Møller. The composer and singer aims at exploring possibilities to overcome what is generally treated as a “right” or “wrong” sung tone. It is music that is composed but does not require a score and thus becomes “performatively present”. It is music that is easy to play, but neither banal nor simple.
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| About Mathias Monrad Møller |
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| Mathias Monrad Møller is a composer and singer. Born in Denmark in 1988, he grew up in northern Germany. He was a member of St. Thomas Boys Choir in Leipzig and studied composition at Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main from 2008-12. He holds a BA in classical singing from Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” Berlin as well as a MA in singing from the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen. From 2017-20 he was a member of the Opera Academy at the Royal Danish Theatre. He is regularly performing in operatic productions, among others on the stages of the Royal Danish Opera House, as well as a singer of the concert repertoire. A main focus of his work as a singer is the music of Bach, as well as contemporary and Lied repertoire. As a composer, he has received commissions among others from Hessischer Rundfunk, Klang Festival Copenhagen, Solistenensemble PHØNIX16, Mocrep Chicago, Aarhus Unge Tonekunstnere for Aarhus Symfoniorkester. His pieces have been performed at Unerhörte Musik Berlin, Acht Brücken Köln, Waverly Project at New York University, Young Nordic Music Days in Reykjavik 2012, Oslo 2013 and Reykjavik 2017 as well as at Nordic Music Days Copenhagen 2015. His works have been broadcast on Norwegian, Danish and German national radio. Mathias has been awarded the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl Nielsen Talent Prize as a composer and Léonie Sonnings Talent Prize as a composer and singer. |
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| About Solistenensemble PHØNIX16 |
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| PHØNIX16, founded in Berlin in 2012, is a collective of vocalists performing music by living composers. They may or may not use their voice. The group consists of 12 singers, a resident composer, a sound director, an artistic production manager and an art director, who combine voices with percussion, electronics, instruments and moving images. Breaking with the tradition of a homogenous vocal ensemble sound, the singers perform as individuals together. PHØNIX16 produces and curates two concert series at Silent Green and Heimathafen in Berlin. Besides premiering new works, PHØNIX16 also performs works according to the following categories: "sudden death" works (performed once, and never again), "death penalty" works (too difficult, too weird, too special), "exorcism" works (compositions in the “wrong body”, for the wrong instrumentation, which are brought to their proper destination) or "walking dead" works by dead composers (professional deaths are not considered). PHØNIX16 works with a range of carefully chosen co-conspirators: Poing (Norway), Ensemble Mosaik, Zafraan Ensemble, Kwartludium (Poland), and S.A.F.T., among others. Concerts in Germany and abroad include shows at Ultraschall Berlin, Gdanski Festiwal Muzyczny, Maerzmusik, Transmediale, Documenta. In 2015 PHØNIX16 was Ensemble-In-Residence at the Figura Festival in Copenhagen. The first CD recording of PHØNIX16, Dariusz Przybylski's PASSIO FOR 12 VOICES, was nominated for the FRYDERYK, the Polish Record Industry Award. PHØNIX16 is supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. |
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| About Timo Kreuser |
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| Timo Kreuser, conductor and artistic director of PHØNIX16, is a German composer and conductor educated at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Munich, the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden and at Hochschule für Musik „Hanns Eisler“ in Berlin. From 2006-2008 he was a scholarship recipient of the Absolute Academy of Absolute Ensemble NYC and Kristjan Järvi, and from 2007–2009 of the Akademie Musiktheater heute of the Deutsche Bank Stiftung. Timo frequently performs as an experimental pianist and vocalist, specialising in extended techniques. With a primary focus on experimental music, Timo Kreuser has conducted at festivals such as Biennale Bern, Maerzmusik, Semperoper Dresden, Komische Oper Berlin, Salzburger Festspiele, Music Festival Gdansk, the Venice Biennale, and many others. Kreuser’s relationship with contemporary forms of stage art is represented by his frequent participation in projects of/with Christoph Schlingensief, Frank Castorf, Luk Perceval, Jonathan Meese, Peaches, Josef Bierbichler, Romeo Castelucci, Vegard Vinge / Ida Müller and Thomas Ostermeier. He has lectured on contemporary vocal music performance and vocal improvisation at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, Warsaw, the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts Southern Denmark, Odense and the Akademi for Scenekunst, Fredrikstad and consulted on projects for the German Arts Council. |
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| About Carola Schaal |
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| Carola Schaal, clarinetist and performer, born in Tübingen in 1982, studied in Darmstadt, Düsseldorf and Hamburg. In 2009 she completed her master's degree with Prof. Alexander Bachl at the University of Music and Theater Hamburg. From 2011 to 2013 Carola received a scholarship of the Anni-Taube-Stiftung Hamburg. She has attended master classes and workshops with Ernesto Molinari, Jean-Marc Foltz, Martin Fröst, Ralph Manno, Shizuyo Oka and Jennifer Walshe, among others. As a soloist, she has performed in China, the USA, Chile and Mexico. She has taught a masterclass for clarinet as part of the XIV Festival Internacional de Música Contemporánea 2014 in Santiago de Chile. She regularly collaborates with pianist Anne von Twardowski, cellist Sonja Lena Schmid and violinist Hibiki Oshima and overhead and light artist Katrin Bethge. A particular interest of hers lies in contemporary music. She is a founding member of Decoder Ensemble, a “band” for contemporary music. Increasingly, her work explores the performative, sounding out the space in between music, performance and body. Since 2018 she works in a close artistic collaboration with choreographer Heinrich Horwitz, resulting in the solo show “Bonny Crude”. In 2018, she received a scholarship of the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg. From May to October 2019, Carola Schaal was a resident scholarship holder at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. |
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| About Sebastian Berweck |
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| With over 240 premieres, Sebastian Berweck is one of the most sought-after performers for experimental contemporary music. As a soloist and ensemble member he has in recent years performed at almost all the great festivals for new music, such as Ultraschall Berlin, Maerzmusik Berlin, Wien Modern, Steirischer Herbst, Salzburg Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, ISCM World New Music Days, Inventionen Berlin, piano+ festival ZKM Karlsruhe, Klangwerkstatt Berlin, Klangwerktage Hamburg, Heidelberger Frühling, Nous Sons Festival Barcelona or the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, where he also taught electroacoustic interpretation. In addition to virtuosity, extended playing techniques and performance work, an important focus of his work is electronics. With the synthesizer trio Lange/Berweck/Lorenz he reanimates the forgotten practice of live electronics from the 1970s and 1980s, performing music that hasn’t been heard for decades. From 2008-2012 he conducted research at the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) of the University of Huddersfield on problems with the performance of music of live electronics, supported by the DAAD. His PhD thesis with the title "It worked yesterday - On (re-)performing electroacoustic music" was released in 2013. He has taught masterclasses and lectures at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, SUNY Buffalo, and the SU San Francisco. Sebastian Berweck lives in Berlin and is a co-founder of stock11.de. |
1CD | III Edition | Orchestral | Vocal | Contemporary |
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