Internationally acclaimed musicologist Laurence Dreyfus has recently published a historical novel based on the relationship between Richard Wagner and his preferred conductor, Herman Levi. Wagner, known for his antisemitic rhetoric, chose Levi to conduct the premiere of Parsifal at the newly constructed Bayreuth opera house. The novel is the story of this intriguing personal and musical collaboration and contains 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 consort of viols founded by Dreyfus in 1994, playing a program of Handel, Purcell, and Bach. Afterwards, Dreyfus will do a short reading from his novel, 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.
Laurence Dreyfus is a noted interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach, both as a scholar and performer. His other interests include English consort music of the 16th and 17th centuries and the works of Richard Wagner. As an historian and analyst, Dreyfus has published Bach’s Continuo Group as well as Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Harvard University Press, 1987 and 1996), the latter of which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the best book of the year. In 2010, he published Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Harvard University Press). 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 1997Gramophone Award. Seven further Phantasm CDs (on Simax, EMI, GMN, and Channel Classics) 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. Phantasm won the 2017 Diapason d’or de l’année and the 2017 Gramophone Prize (Early Music) for their recording of Dowland’s Lachrimae.
Dreyfus holds a PhD in musicology from Columbia University in New York, where he studied under noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff. He studied cello at the Juilliard School in New York with Leonard Rose, and viol at the Royal Conservatoire with Wieland Kuijken at Brussels, which awarded him its Diplome supérieur with highest distinction. Dreyfus taught at Yale, Chicago, and Stanford universities 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. He was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1995 and (for his musicological work) a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. From 2005-2010, Phantasm was Consort-in-Residence in the University, and then from 2010 until 2015 Consort-in-Residence at Magdalen College. 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 theater, 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. 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. His sculptures have been widely exhibited, including Double Angel at Venice Biennale and a Bach sculpture at London’s Royal Academy of Music. His sculpture The Couple stands in the foyer of the Paris Opera Bastille and his Homage to Paul Celan in the Anne Frank garden in Paris. Other public works include his monumental sculpture of Giodanno Bruni in the Plotz Metro in Berlin (this sculpture is also installed at the Central European University in Budapest and the City Hall in Nola, Italy). Additionally his Fallen Angel is at the Collegium Helveticum, Zürich;; Socrates for Tel Aviv University, Dante Heads at Teatro Real in Madrid, and The Couple II for La Monnaie/De Mund Royal Opera House in Brussels.
Major exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Budapest, Bucharest, Naples, Berlin’s Institute of Advanced Studies, Bard College in New York, Einstein Forum Potsdam, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Teatro Real – Madrid, NCPA Beijing, Salzburg Easter Festival and Anna Akhmatova Museum in St. Petersburg, and the New York Public Library. Solo exhibitions of his work were shown at Grand Théâtre de Genève to coincide with his designs for Iphigénie en Tauride and the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop showed “Aus meinem Augenfenster, Hommage an Thomas Brasch”. In 2015 his artworks were exhibited at the Vatican Museums in Rome. The exhibition has also been shown in The House of Representatives, Berlin.
Born in East Germany, Polzin has been the recipient of “Artist-in-Residences” at the International Artists House in Herzliya, Israel, Kollegium Helveticum – Zurich, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, and the Centre for Advanced Study at the Käte Hamburger Collegium for Research in the Humanities in Bonn. Polzin has also been a visiting professor at ETH Zurich and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Polzin has worked regularly with musicians and composers and has directed opera, including Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, at La Monnaie de Brusselles. Regarding his sculptures of Johann Sebastian Bach, “Polzin’s Bach sculptures bring out what he listens to. They are not portraits in the traditional sense, but physical manifestations of musical thought.” Interlude, The Contradictions of Bach interview
Alexander Polzin has been at the Arts Arena for the inauguration of his Paul Celan sculpture, for a conversation about Bach with pianist Filippo Gorini, who performed the entirety of The Art of the Fugue, and in discussion about public art on the occasion of the publication of a book about his sculptures in public spaces. We are delighted to welcome him once again to the Arts Arena.
Reservations are required.