23 SEP 19:00
Vitlycke - CPA
HARP QUARTET AHA
Hélène Breschand (FR) / Rhodri Davies (GB-WLS) / Milana Zaric (RS) / Stina Hellberg Agback (SE)
Concert
Duration: 60 min
Harpists Milana Zaric, Hélène Brechand, Rhodri Davies and Stina Hellberg Agback join forces in a cutting-edge harp quartet, the AHA. The group was formed at the World Harp Congress in Wales in 2022, joined in the interest for experimental contemporary music, including improvisation and new music. Their individual experiences span from world premieres of world class composers, progressive rock music, orchestral work, jazz and free improvisation.
AHA has commissioned a composition by composer Magnus Granberg (Skogen). With a delicate sense for creating music in the borderlands between the written and the improvised, Granberg has created a composition which brings out all the different aspects of the players of AHA and the possibilities of the modern harpist. Together with this work, the ensemble will also be playing music composed by the members.
PRESS
”Stina Hellberg Agback on the harp makes it sound like this is what the instrument is made to do, from the beginning” – Adina Magnusson, NWT about the album Trilobit/Brutus by Stina Hellberg Agback.
“Rhodri Davies transcends conventional ideas about the harp--an instrument rarely associated with improvised music--in his wide-ranging projects.” - about John Butcher & Rhodri Davies’ album Carliol.
‘‘The music of Hélène Breschand is of great meditative strength and encapsulates a musical richness that makes forget the s pecificity of its instrument, achieving a singular universality‘‘- Mouvement
‘‘Hélène Breschand demonstrating her readiness to deconstruct her instrument's identity...if you still regard the harp as an anachronism, just experience the scope and power of Breschand's Le Goût du Sel‘‘ - Julian Cowley, The Wire
CREDITS
With the support from Statens Kulturråd.
The concert within HERE:2023 is organized in collaboration with Gerlesborgsskolan.
BIOS
STINA HELLBERG AGBACK
Stina Hellberg Agback - project leader, harpist. Stina is an improvising harpist with her roots in jazz and free improvisation. A former student of the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Berklee College of Music in Boston and Trinity College of Music in London, she has studied with Gabriella Dall'Olio, Felice Pomeranz, Ove Lundin and Mitch Haupers, to develop a distinguished style of her own. In her jazz improvisations she happily blends contemporary techniques, extended technique and a heavily piano-influenced jazz-styled improvisation, pushing the harp forward in the field of jazz.
She can be heard with contemporary jazz bands Mattias Risbergs Mining, Skogen, Mariam the Believer, Namna, SHA3K, Hexabit and more, as well as classical orchestras such as Uppsala Kammarorkester and Stockholms Blåsarsymfoniker. She also performs new music in a duo with legendary violinist Eva Lindal, as well as in the flute-viola-harp trio Älvkvarn.
Read more
RHODRI DAVIES
Rhodri Davies was born in 1971 and lives in Swansea, South Wales. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations. He has released four solo albums: Trem, Over Shadows, Wound Response and An Air Swept Clean of All Distance. His regular groups include: HENOGLEDD, Cranc, a duo with John Butcher, The Sealed Knot, Common Objects and a trio with John Tilbury and Michael Duch. He has worked with artists like David Sylvian, Jenny Hval and Derek Bailey.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. New pieces for solo harp have been composed for him by: Eliane Radigue, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Christian Wolff, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, since 2016 he is a Chapter Associate Artist and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award.
HÈLÈNE BRESCHAND
Hélène Breschand is an international solist, composer, an emblematic figure of experimental and contemporary harp. She belongs to a generation of musicians sensitive to trans-disciplinarity. Interested in multiple forms of art, in the course of her career she collaborated with classical musicians (Luciano Berio, Bernard Cavanna) and contemporary composers (Eliane Radigue, David Toop, Elliott Sharp, Reinhold Friedl, Franck Vigroux, Wilfried Wendling). She also creates music for plastic arts (Hiroshi Sugimoto, Christian Marcla), films (« Jeanne d’Arc » de Dreyer, «Salomé» de Charles Bryant) and dance (avec Mic Guillaumes, Christian UBL).
MILANA ZARIC
Equally active in classical, contemporary composed, experimental and freely improvised music, harpist Milana Zarić connects creative performance with contemporary sensibility and new technologies. Milana has been the principal harpist of Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra since 2005, and a leader of Ensemble Studio 6, a contemporary music group active since 2012.
A specialist in harp repertoire from 1960s onwards, Milana has been regularly collaborating with composers and sound artists, many of whom have dedicated works to her. She has commissioned and premiered over 30 solo and ensemble new works. Milana has toured internationally as a solo, chamber and orchestral musician as well as a free improviser in many formations. One of her most active duets is harp and electronics with Richard Barrett. They have been performing together worldwide since 2013, playing original composed and collaborative works.
Apart from performance activities, Milana has taught and lectured at universities in the US and the UK, and has taken part in gender equality projects.
MAGNUS GRANBERG
Magnus Granberg is a composer and performer working at an intersection between contemporary chamber music and improvisation. He is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Self-taught as a composer, he formed his own ensemble Skogen in 2005 trying to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi. Now mainly working with the ensemble Skogen and the newly formed Skuggorna och ljuset, while increasingly also writing music on commission for different ensembles and projects. He is also active as an improvisor in different contexts, mainly playing the clarinet. His music has been performed in and broadcasted on by public radio chanels many European countries and the United States. He has been also published by the renowned British record label Another Timbre.
Magnus Granberg about the composition “Blow Away, Skies So Grey!”, a piece for four harps commissioned by the newly formed, international harp quartet AHA, ”Blow Away, Skies So Grey! departures from two very different pieces of music from vastly different times and places, which only happen to have in common that I was captivated by them, for various reasons, at the time of the piece's conception: Je me merveil by the late medieval harpist and composer Jacob de Senleches as well as Ill Wind by the American Schlager composer Harold Arlen. The piece consists of a temporal framework and a small number of fairly extensive material groups which the musicians navigate (individually and collectively) with the help of both a series of instructions and their good judgement. The piece borrows its title from a couple of lines from Ted Koehler's text to Harold Arlen's song, a song that I have heard many times over the years but which, strangely enough, I never really took notice of until it finally, somewhat unnoticed and by way of detours, found its way to me in the spring of 2023.”
Read more