Season 2018 | 19
DAM Festival, Prishtina Kosovo | 26 thru 31 March
Oerknal will be ensemble-in-residence for the 2019 edition of DAM Festival, Kosovo! This residency will include chamber concerts, lectures, workshops, and masterclasses with students from the Faculty of Arts in Prishtina. It will also mark the inaugural edition of the Balkan Composer Competition in Prishtina (BCCP), a program open to young professional composers hailing from the six non-EU Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia).
AMERICANA | 28 March
John Zorn - Cat O' Nine Tails (1988)
David Lang - Press Release (1992)
John Luther Adams - Among Red Mountains (2001)
John Luther Adams - Red Arc/Blue Veil (2002)
A program of contemporary American chamber music, including John Zorn's postmodern cut-and-paste masterpiece Cat O' Nine Tails, David Lang's funk-inspired bass clarinet solo Press Release and John Luther Adams' riveting and expansive postminimalist landscapes.
BCCP | 29 March
Anda Kryeziu (Kosovo, b. 1993) - Time | Change | Rate
Damjan Jovicin (Serbia, b. 1995) - Makes no (drama) sense
Angel Spiroski (Macedonia, b. 1996) - Salvation Creak
Nemanja Radivojevic (Serbia, b. 1981) - Pharos 0.2
Ylli Daklani (Kosovo, b. 1998) - The Newborn
The Balkan Composer Competition in Prishtina (BCCP) is a collaboration between DAM Festival and Oerknal with the goal of giving emerging composers from the six non-EU Balkan countries an opportunity to work with a world-class European new music ensemble.
Guided by American conductor and composer Gregory Charette, this program will enable selected composers to work directly with the players of Oerknal during a week of workshops and rehearsals in Prishtina. Selected composers will write a piece of between 6-10 minutes for an ensemble of flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, 2 violins, viola, cello (composers are free to write for a smaller subset of the ensemble so long as the piece includes at least 5 instruments). The residency will culminate with a public concert in Prishtina as part of DAM Festival 2019. After this concert the members of Oerknal will select one of the six composers to write a piece for full ensemble to be featured in Oerknal’s 2019/20 season with performances around The Netherlands. In this way the ultimate goal of BCCP is to build substantive relationships between composers and music institutions in the Balkans and the EU.
This edition of BCCP was made possible in part through generous donations from the European Union 'Culture for Change' initiative, Arthur Klaassens, Lewis Nielson and Stephanie Sprague. The results of the competition were as follows:
Silver Lynx Award: Anda Kryeziu, Nemanja Radivojevic (tie)
Kosovo Philharmonic Award: Angel Spiroski
DAMcademy Award: Damjan Jovicin
Audience Selection: Ylli Daklani
FACULTY OF ARTS, STUDENT CONCERT | 31 March
Philip Glass - String Quartet No. 2, "Company" (1983)
John Zorn - Christabel (1972)
Morton Feldman - Projection No. 1 (1950)
John Luther Adams - The Farthest Place (2001)
Frederic Rzewski - Les Moutons de Panurge (1969)
Coached by members of Oerknal, students from the Faculty of Arts Prishtina will present a concert of 20th-century American repertoire, ranging from the graphic scores of Morton Feldman to the improvisational minimalism of Frederic Rzewski. Oerknal will join the students side-by-side on stage.
Press Release, a short documentary by Anisa Xhomaqi chronicling Oerknal's work in Kosovo in 2019, can be found below.