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Welcome to Master in Music and Episode nr 10!
Before I start the introduction, I like to remind the listeners that Master in music is free to listen to but not to make so every little contribution to making the podcast exist is most welcome you can contribute by go to www.masterinmusic.com and by me a coffee.
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For today’s episode we are going to meet a living composer, Vykintas Baltakas.
He is an intriguing and fascinating composer and conductor. He origins from Lithuania, studied in Karlsruhe with Wolfgang Rihm and Conducting with Andreas Weiss. He has conducted the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Ensemble Modern, and Klangforum Wien.
He has participated in competitions and had amazing results, Peter Eötvös describes him like this:
“What is remarkable about Vykintas Baltakas is his own brusque, harsh, very attentive and confident demeanour, his personal musical language, sometimes amusingly brittle, always explorative, always active and professional. His constant development, the versatility of his artistic creativity and his permanently progressive musical stance have encouraged me to nominate him for this prestigious prize.”
Peter Eötvös
Conservatorium Maastricht, where he is the composing teacher, describes him as musical Scheherazade. His music keeps pulling you in and referencing itself, sometimes branching off and reinventing itself, and sometimes returning to where it started. He weaves musical stories that are linked with a delicate interconnected web.
In this episode we talk about how to compose music. How to find your inner personality, what makes good music and great musicians. What he thinks are the keys to composing. We also talk about the future and what it will bring, how to communicate and much more. I didn’t want this interview to end because It was so thrilling.
Ladys and gentlemen now we are going to dive into the musical universe of Vykintas Baltakas, he describes it like:
A bright scherzo, (co)ro(na) for small ensemble. From Ouroboros, he took the fermata in measure 313 and used that as the sonic object as the seed. The title is a little misleading in that we may mistakenly think of a fermata (or corona) as just a pause, but fermatas are full of energy at multiple levels, almost like watching a hummingbird hovering in the distance – they seem almost motionless but the energy and actual motion beneath that cool surface is tremendous. Such is the case with (co)ro(na), with energetic quivering elegantly levitating the music.
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