News

Dear friends and colleagues,

this Thursday (January 18th) my piano concerto GENESIS will be premiered with the jazz pianist Michael Wollny at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, the Gewandhaus orchestra will be conducted by Alan Gilbert. 

The follow-up performance on Friday will be broadcast live by MDR Kultur and MDR Klassik. (20:00 German time)

I’m sending you the links for the radio station here, so you can listen to the concert worldwide.

(link Edition Peters / Wise group)
(link radio MDR Kultur)
(link MDR Klassik)
(radio information)
All the best,
Bernd
_______

mv05_7959
“Bernd Franke`s work distinguishes itself from other types of music formed by the emphasis of contrasts not only by its elegance and hedonistic character but ultimately by the way such contrasts are minutely built up and stressed through an ever-sharpening differentiation of sounds towards a timbre- determining voicing through which the polarities are not discharged as unresolved conflicts, but rather preserve a striving for balance and harmony which, however, in the end remains unattained.

His dramaturgically-tonal compositions aim at achieving a musical language directly understandable by the hearer but without degenerating into banality or neoromanticism. On the contrary, comprehensibility and differentiation (tonal as well as structural) are two strands of one intention: to write music which is communicative but which does not drag with it the embarrassing baggage of obligatory convention.

Musical influences for Franke have been Witold Lutoslawski and Edgar Varèse as well as Charles Ives, John Cage and Morton Feldman. Development has been both quick and slow, principally brought about by engaging with the work of other composers and more especially with painters such as Chagall, Dürer, Goya, WOLS, Pousette-Dart, Erich Hauser and above all Joseph Beuys.”

(Gisela Nauck)