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Toronto Symphony Orchestra Presents the Canadian Premiere of Matthias Pintscher's towards Osiris

Apr. 01, 2016

Toronto Symphony Orchestra Presents the Canadian Premiere of Matthias Pintscher's <em>towards Osiris</em>

Matthias Pintscher makes his Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducting debut on April 28 when he leads the orchestra in the Canadian premiere of his own towards Osiris. The concert takes place at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, with a repeat performance on April 30.

Following the work's New York premiere in 2011, Anthony Tommasini wrote of towards Osiris in The New York Times:

In this urgent, pungently atonal music [Pintscher] explores dimensions of disintegration and reintegration. Over stretches of sustained harmonic backdrops musical fragments come and go: squirreling figures, aborted melodic flights, hazy bursts of brass with indeterminate pitch. Sometimes a slicing fortissimo chord explodes, and in its wake you hear hushed, ominous, scurrying riffs. Are these remnants of disintegrating music? Or germinal building blocks? The ambiguity pulls you in.


On April 1, George Manahan conducted the American Composers Orchestra in a performance of Pintscher’s Songs from Solomon’s Garden at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. For Pintscher, the starting point for the piece, which is a setting of a song from the Shir-ha shirim (the Song of Solomon), is the text: “the aura, archaism and intensity of the songs in their concentration.” He continues:

The language is so expressive, because it is so compressed. The words are islands of expression; they circle within themselves and are so rich in substance that each word radiates towards the next. There is so much space for sound in them, for music. The text allows other parameters, the sound, to join together without corrupting the autonomy of the words.

Details on the performances can be found at tso.ca and americancomposers.org.

Learn more on the music of Matthias Pintscher by visiting matthiaspintscher.com and bärenreiter.com. 

Matthias Pintscher
towards Osiris (2005)
for orchestra
3.(2, 3.pic).2.ca.2.bcl(cbcl).2.cbsn-4.3.2.btbn.1-4perc-2hp.pno.cel-str
8’

songs from Solomon’s garden (2009)
for baritone and chamber orchestra
1(pic).1.1.bcl.1.cbsn-1.2.1.0-3perc-hp.pno-str
20’

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