Sound & Color:
The World of Miró
Sunday October 17, 6pm
MATCH Gallery
3400 Main Street, Houston TX 77002
$25 or Pay What You Can
Sebastian Stefanovic, Viola
Natalie Lin Douglas, Violin
Carter Coleman, Violin
David Olson, Cello
Brady Spitz, Percussion
About
Joined by percussionist Brady Spitz, Kinetic will premiere The World of Miró by South African composer Peter Klatzow. This colorful program centers on the exploratory and radical artistic movements brewing in Paris around the turn of the century and their ripples through time and space. The World of Miró, for marimba and string quartet, creates sonic tapestries that pair with Catalan artist Joan Miró’s fresh and geometric paintings. While working in Paris, Miró ran in the same social circles as composer Erwin Schulhoff, whose Five Pieces for String Quartet strike up a similarly sardonic attitude – both men were openly contemptuous of the traditionalist streams of mainstream art. Those Parisian traditions had received a swift kick in the pants two decades earlier thanks to the works of artistic and musical ‘impressionists’; chief among them, Debussy and Ravel, whose string quartets serve as the model for contemporary American composer Jennifer Higdon’s Impressions.
Program
Erwin Schulhoff: Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923)
Peter Klatzow: The World of Miró for Marimba and String Quartet (2020) — World Premiere
Jennifer Higdon: Impressions for String Quartet (2003)
Featured Artists
Dr. Brady Spitz is a percussionist, timpanist, and educator based in Martin, Tennessee where he is the Director of Percussion at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He has extensive performance experience with classical, contemporary, and world percussion in a diverse group of musical environments. He has performed with the Houston Symphony, Hawaii Symphony, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestras among many others. Dr. Spitz maintains an active freelance percussion schedule and has appeared on stage alongside artists such as Idina Menzel, Weird Al Yankovic, and The Who. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with a diverse group of artists, including Claire Chase, Mario Davidovsky, and Percussion Group Cincinnati. His duo Sonic Boom is working to create a repertoire for organ and percussion where very little has existed before, yielding several upcoming international engagements.
He has given performances and clinics across the United States, as well as performing at the Percussive Arts Society’s International Conventions in 2005, 2008, and as a featured soloist with Hamiruge’s 2009 appearance. He was the director for the Houston Baptist University Gamelan Ensemble’s appearance at PASIC in 2019. He maintains an active research interest in Lou Harrison’s American Gamelan repertoire and the American Gamelan movement.
Previously, he was the front ensemble director and co-designer for the nationally-recognized Northshore High School Indoor Percussion Program, a group that won four consecutive Texas State Championships, multiple WGI Regional Championships, and was a World Class Finalist at the 2014 WGI World Championships. In his decade of private studio teaching, his students placed highly in all of the state-wide solo competitions, received consistent Superior Division UIL ratings in both solo and ensemble playing, and auditioned into some of the top colleges and conservatories in the nation.
Dr. Spitz holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Rice University, where he was awarded the Benjamin Armistead Shepherd Teaching Fellowship. He also holds a Bachelor of Music Performance in Percussion, magna cum laude, from the University of North Texas College of Music and a Master of Music in Percussion Performance from Louisiana State University. His teachers include Matthew Strauss, Richard Brown, Mark Ford, Christopher Deane, Brett William Dietz, Ed Soph, Paul Rennick, Jim Atwood, Jose Aponte, Poovalur Sriji, and Ed Smith.
Mr. Spitz is an endorser of Innovative Percussion and Black Swamp Percussion.
Brady Spitz, Percussionist
Peter Klatzow was born in Springs, South Africa, in 1945.
In 1964 he attended the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied composition with Bernard Stevens, piano with Kathleen Long, and orchestration with Gordon Jacob. In that year he won several of the College composition prizes as well as the Royal Philharmonic prize for composition, which was open to any Commonwealth composer under 30. He spent the following years in Italy and Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger.
Since returning to South Africa in 1966, he has worked at the SABC in Johannesburg as a music producer, and in 1973 was appointed to the University of Cape Town, where he was Director of the College of Music and Professor in Composition. In 1986 he was elected to the rank of Fellow of the University of Cape Town for “having performed original distinguished academic work of such quality as to merit special recognition.” He was awarded his DMus for published work in Composition in 1999, and the Cape Tercentenary Foundation’s Molteno Gold medal for lifetime achievement in Music in 2002.
One of the few South African composers to achieve international recognition, Peter Klatzow has won prizes in Spain, the United Kingdom and Toronto, and his works have been performed in various European centres and in the United States. In South Africa he was awarded the prestigious Helgard Steyn prize for his piano suite From the Poets. His major works include a full length ballet on Hamlet for which he was given a special Nederburg award for the music, scores for ballets on Drie Diere and Vier Gebede, and Concertos for various solo instruments; piano, clarinet, organ, marimba, and a double Concerto for flute and marimba which was performed at Yale University, USA. His Prayers and Dances of Praise from Africa was introduced at the Three Choirs Festival, Worcester, UK on 24 August 1996.
Recent commissions include The World of Paul Klee (III), composed for the opening of the new Paul Klee Centre in Berne, Switzerland, a celebratory Te Deum for choir, organ and orchestra, commissioned for a special service celebrating the 100th anniversary of St George's Cathedral, Cape Town and Towards the Light, a work for double choir, marimba and organ commissioned for the opening of the new Peabody concert hall (USA) in April 2004. He was also commissioned by the University of Cape Town to provide a short (20 minute) opera for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the SACM. He was also commissioned by SAMRO to compose a setting of Thabo Mbeki’s speech “I am an African” for use in the international vocal scholarship competition in September 2011. That same year year he also attended a major festival of his marimba works in Tokyo, where he also lectured at the Tokyo Music School and give master classes on his music.
His discography includes recordings of his piano music, the Mass for Choir, Horn, Marimba and Strings, String Quartet, Chamber Concerto for 7, Piano Concerto, From the Poets, an RCA issue of Return of the Moon with the King’s Singers and Evelyn Glennie, and a CD of his choral music made by the international Herald company entitled Towards the Light – the choral music of Peter Klatzow. His Marimba concerto has been reissued in a new recording made by Markus Leoson and issued by the Swedish label NOSAG in 2006. His CD entitled Myths, Magic and Marimbas – the music of Peter Klatzow was also issued in July 2006. He is now retired from the University of Cape Town, where he remains and is a Professor Emeritus. In 2011 the SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns awarded him the Huberte Rupert music prize for his lifetime work.
Shortly after these performances Peter attended a major international event Peter Klatzow in the City which was held for a week in Rotterdam, and featured his music for marimba. There were three performances of his concerto for flute, marimba and strings with Tatiana Koleva and Eleonore Palmeijr and they premiered his new work Night Sky with Illuminations which was commissioned by the Eduard von Beinum Foundation in Rotterdam.
In 2014 Peter Klatzow was once again awarded the Helgard Steyn prize (now worth R520000) for his work Lightscapes which was commissioned for the World Marimba Festival in Stuttgart in 2012. He was also appointed Composer in Residence for the 2015 Johannesburg International Mozart Festival.
Peter Klatzow, composer