Internationally acclaimed musicologist Laurence Dreyfus recently published an historical novel centered on the relationship between Richard Wagner and his preferred conductor, Hermann Levi, whom he chose to conduct the premiere of his opera Parsifal at the newly constructed Bayreuth opera house. Wagner was known for his antisemitic rhetoric. Levi was the son of the district Rabbi of Giessen. Levi has also been an intimate of Brahms, whose music circle rejected Wagner’s radical work. The novel is the story of these intriguing musical and personal collaborations.
Scattered among the limited-edition pages of the novel is artwork by German painter and sculptor Alexander Polzin, well known to Arts Arena audiences.
The evening will begin with a mini-concert by Phantasm, the viol consort founded by Dreyfus in 1994, followed by a conversation among Dreyfus, Polzin, and Arts Arena Founder and Artistic Director Margery Arent Safir.
A coupe de champagne will follow and the book will be available for signing.
Reservations are required.
Laurence Dreyfus is a renowned interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach, both as a scholar and performer. He is the author of Bach’s Continuo Group as well as Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Harvard University Press, 1987 and 1996), which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the best book of the year. He has also published on Richard Wagner, including Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Harvard University Press, 2010). And, as a bass viol player, he has recorded CDs of Bach’s viola da gamba sonatas of Marais’ Pièces de violes and Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concert (all with Ketil Haugsand on the Simax label).
In 1994, Dreyfus founded Phantasm, a consort of viols, whose debut recording of Purcell’s Viol Fantasies won a 1997 Gramophone Award. Seven further Phantasm CDs were devoted to works by Byrd, Mico, Locke, and Lawes, alongside a rendition of Bach’s Art of Fugue. Phantasm’s disc of Orlando Gibbons’s Consorts (AVIE) won the 2004 Gramophone Award and was a finalist for Record of the Year. Since then, they issued 19 further recordings of English consort music which have garnered critical acclaim worldwide. Most recently, Phantasm won the 2017 Diapason d’or de l’année and the 2017 Gramophone Prize (Early Music) for their recording of Dowland’s Lachrimae. (www.phantasm.org.uk)
Professor Dreyfus has taught at Yale, Chicago and Stanford before moving to London where he held a Chair at the Royal Academy of Music and King’s College London as the Thurston Dart Professor of Performance Studies, then Oxford. He was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1995 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. From 2010 until 2015, Phantasm was Consort-in-Residence at Magdalen College, Oxford.
He retired from his teaching posts in Oxford in 2015 and relocated to Berlin where he pursues independent research and continues to play and tour internationally with Phantasm. In 2018 he was named a Fellow of the Institut d’Études avancées to develop his work on historically-informed music analysis.
Alexander Polzin is a sculptor, painter and stage designer whose work spans visual art, opera, dance and theatre, combining material, music and performance. Originally trained as a stonemason, he brings a strong understanding of structure to his practice, creating sculptural and spatial responses to music that translate rhythm and counterpoint into three-dimensional form. He has collaborated with composers including Helmut Lachenmann and György Kurtág, and designed productions at venues including Grand Théâtre de Genève and Teatro Real. He has collaborated with Laurence Dreyfus on his interdisciplinary music projects include The Art of Being Human with viol consort Phantasm, presented at venues such as the Boulez Saal and Snape Maltings.
Polzin’s sculptures have been widely exhibited, including Double Angel at Venice Biennale and a Bach sculpture at London’s Royal Academy of Music. His The Couple sculpture stands in the foyer of the Paris Opera Bastille and his Homage to Paul Celan in Paris’s Anne Frank Garden. Other major public sculptures include his massive Giordano Bruni in the Berlin subway. His bust of Bach has been displayed at the Royale Academy of Music and his Requiem at the New York Public Library.
Alexander Polzin has appeared at the Arts Arena on multiple occasions to discuss his public art and to relate sculptor to music in conversation with pianist Filippo Gorini about Bach, followed by Gorini’s performance of The Art of the Fugue.
Phantasm is a world-renowned, award-winning consort of viols founded in 1994 by artistic director and viol player Laurence Dreyfus. Known for intense, homogenous tones and vibrant polyphonic interpretations, the ensemble has won three Gramophone Awards and performs international concert repertoires spanning English and Baroque masters. Phantasm will play a program of Bach, Hayden, and Purcell.