Esprit Orchestra continues their 43rd season with Heat Efficiency, a program that includes a world premiere, the return of an audience favourite, one North American premiere, and the Canadian premiere of two works by composer Aziza Sadikova. The concert takes place March 26 at Koerner Hall.
Uzbek-German composer Aziza Sadikova has found champions for her music in conductors Omer Meir Wellber, Jonathan Stockhammer, and Kent Nagano. The latter gave the world premiere of her Farbenzeiten with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in December 2024.
LV caught up with the busy composer to talk about her music.
Aziza Sadikova
Aziza Sadikova grew up in Uzabekistan, and began studying both piano and composition at the age of five. She went on to music studies at the Tashkent State Conservatoire, followed by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Trinity College in London.
Her music has been performed by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Orchestre National de France, BBC Philharmonic, SWR Symphony Orchestra, and other leading ensembles. It has been programmed at the BBC Proms, Bachfest Leipzig, Wien Modern, Philharmonic Academy Concerts in Hamburg, Aspekte Salzburg, Klangwerkstatt Berlin and ReMusic Festival St Petersburg, among other festivals and organizations.
Aziza Sadikova: The Interview
Her music may sometimes draw from classical traditions, but takes them in directions that are thoroughly modern, and often unexpected.
“I’d like to say that I live in Berlin,” she says, “and you know it’s full of interesting experimental concerts and ensembles here. That’s why I moved here from London.”
She found the new music scene in the UK a little more conservative.
“But here, it’s just crazy. You hear all kinds of stuff,” she says.
“When I arrived here, I was really into experiments.” She worked with a number of experimental ensembles, creating unusual sounds and using unusual objects, like stones. She still enjoys working with experimental groups, even as larger orchestras have come to embrace her music.
“My aim is to try and connect that with, I would like to say classical tradition, but more classical orchestral concert stage music,” she explains. “What I hear mostly, what is written mostly for the concert stage, is pretty classical.” She calls it “careful” music.
“But I don’t want to do that. I want to kind of create this, maybe start with this, but take my listener on another journey, and open up the boundaries.”
That’s not to say she’s looking to create the kinds of dissonance, noise music, and other sounds that many still associate with the term “modern music”.
“I don’t want to write purely experimental stuff for concert orchestra. That’s been done,” she says.
It’s more a kind of synthesis of both ends of the spectrum that she aims for. “I love the music of romanticism,” she says. “I love to listen to Rachmaninoff. I feel like tonality still has to much to give to us. I don’t want to write it off completely.”
In her music, she looks to broaden the harmonic textures of tonal music, while pushing its boundaries. “I believe in tonality, and I don’t want to walk away from tonality,” she says.
“To take my listeners to surprising moments in my music — that’s one of the things that I have done with my Vivaldi project,” she says.
“I did some crazy stuff. Funnily, [those] very classically trained audience members loved it.”
Heat Efficiency
Heat Efficiency was written for a specific purpose.
“That was a commission from Düsseldorfer Symphoniker,” she says. “I was given the chance to write a very short piece. I have hardly any pieces for orchestra that last three minutes,” she laughs. “That was a great challenge for me.”
The music evokes the sound of pipes and mechanical noise.
“It’s more like a little etude for orchestra.”
She points out her use of dry chords that depict metallic sounds. “It’s interesting that it’s heat efficiency, but at some points it sounds very cold as well,” Aziza says. “This piece was depicting some mechanical noises, and the technical elements of the pipes, and also some of the waves of the heat,” she adds.
“This is a completely different approach to Angelo di fuoco.”
Composition
“I’m really looking forward, when I start composing, where the music will take me,” Sadikova says. The ideas come to her as she works on a project.
“I would probably imagine how to the overall sound would be sounding at the end, the overall atmosphere of the piece, the sonorities that I would choose and play with,” she explains. Then, with that kind of sketch in mind, she sets to work.
“The writing process, that is where the magic happens.”
A few days before the interview, she describes creating a ten-minute piece with tubular bells and orchestra.
“I just created it in the moment. The music just took me somewhere. It started itself creating some unusual things or dramatic moments,” she says. “Every piece is a kind of surprise for me.”
The premiere of Aziza Sadikova’s Heat Efficiency in 2023:
Angelo di fuoco
Angelo di fuoco is the second piece on the Esprit Orchestra program composed by Sadikova. It’s more of an exception to her usual practice.
“Angelo di fuoco was much more […] prior constructed in my head,” she says. “The title comes from the short poem of Nikolai Gumilev.” The Russian poet and literary critic (1886 to 1921) died tragically after his arrest and execution by the secret Soviet police.
His poem Angelo di fuoco depicts a fiery angel who fights for peace in the world.
“When I read this little poem, I was first really scared, because it’s kind of a scary text. I imagined this angel immediately, and sounds, and the whole sonority around this text.”
Around the time that she was reading the poem, she received a commission from an Italian ensemble.
“I chose this,” she says.
The poem is typically translated into English as:
The wings flutter in the sky like a banner,
The eagle’s cluck, the frantic flight.
Half the torso is flame,
Half the torso is ice..
“When I read this, I was terrified. I jumped up and drew this angel on a big paper, and then I started creating this piece.”
It’s not sacred music, but certainly, the figure of the angel does evoke some elements of religion.
“I wanted really to bring the church chorale inside the piece,” Aziza explains. She cites part of a chorale by Russian composer and choral conductor Pavel Chesnokov within her piece.
“You will hear it played by the brass and tubular bells.”
The piece reaches a climactic point towards its end, to go along with its inspiration.
“A fight in the sky, and I imagined an angel really fighting for this peace.” She wrote the work in 2023. “I also wrote L’Angelo della Luce.” It translate to Angel of Light.
“I’m delighted that it will be performed in Toronto.”
Final Thoughts
“I come from Tashkant,” she says. “I was born in the Soviet Union. I went to one of the most famous music schools in the Soviet Union.” She points out that Tashkent State Conservatoire brought the world some of its leading pianists and educators, including Behzod Abduraimov, Yefim Bronfman, and Elena Jivaeva, among others. “And the composition school was also really strong.”
She credits her professors there with introducing her to contemporary music.
“I was just completely blown away. When I heard Black Angels by George Crumb, I thought, this can’t be!” she recalls.
“It turned my world around. I thought, I want to go into that route.”
Ultimately, it led to her own philosophy of creating music.
“My idea is to really widen this texture of orchestral music. I’m just hoping that it’s working,” Aziza says.
“In my music, emotion and drama are really important. I want the listener to be touched, to get some kind of a message. That’s what I get when I listen to music by Steve Reich or John Adams,” Sadikova adds.
“That’s my aim, rather than to introduce my listener to unusual instrumental experiments that have been done since the sixties. To use now all the elements,” she explains.
“The amazing, incredible new music language.”
Esprit Orchestra rehearses Claude Vivier’s Orion in 2013:
The Toronto Concert
With all the current chaos at European airports, Sadikova is hoping her flight to Toronto will take place as scheduled.
“I really hope to make it.”
Esprit Orchestra’s Heat Efficiency takes place March 26 at Koerner Hall. The full program includes:
- Nicholas Ma’s Memory of Breath, (world premiere) an Esprit Orchestra commission;
- Orion by Claude Vivier;
- Heat Efficiency by Aziza Sadikova (Canadian Premiere);
- No templates (viola concerto) by Swiss composer Dieter Ammann (North American Premiere), featuring German violist Nils Mönkemeyer, co-commissioned by Esprit Orchestra, Basel Symphony Orchestra, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Lucerne Festival & Tongeyeong International Festival;
- Angelo di fuoco by Aziza Sadikova (Canadian Premiere).
Prior to the concert, at 7:15 p.m., composer Alexina Louie will host a pre-concert talk featuring Aziza Sadikova and Nicholas Ma.
Find tickets and other concert details [HERE].
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