Jürg Frey
Jürg Frey (b. 1953 in Aarau, Switzerland) studied in Zurich and Geneva where he graduated with a concert diploma in clarinet under Thomas Friedli. He was co-founder of the Lenzburg Music Forum, and has been artistic director of the Aarau concert series 'Moments Musicaux' for more than ten years. In 1991 he was prize winner at the Boswil International Composition Seminar. He was awarded a sabbatical year (1986 and 1996) and received financial assistance for his stay in Berlin by the Canton of Aargau. Since 1993 he's been associated with the Wandelweiser group, a collective of composer/performers dedicated to the performance, recording and publication of their own music.
Jürg Frey (b. 1953 in Aarau, Switzerland) studied in Zurich and Geneva where he graduated with a concert diploma in clarinet under Thomas Friedli. He was co-founder of the Lenzburg Music Forum, and has been artistic director of the Aarau concert series 'Moments Musicaux' for more than ten years. In 1991 he was prize winner at the Boswil International Composition Seminar. He was awarded a sabbatical year (1986 and 1996) and received financial assistance for his stay in Berlin by the Canton of Aargau. Since 1993 he's been associated with the Wandelweiser group, a collective of composer/performers dedicated to the performance, recording and publication of their own music.
String Quartet No. 4
Huge Tip! Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes masterful soundscapes, calm and vast. With his sensitive ear for colour, sound and precision, he composes music of great serenity and lyricism; a poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound. “My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to w…
Fame di Vento
Huge Tip! Fame di Vento is Manuel Zurria's latest work. A triple CD to evoke the many suggestions and projects that have taken place in recent years, full of collaborations, of the Sicilian flautist. Fame Di Vento is also an idealized homage to Alighiero Boetti, a nomad by culture and vocation. In his footsteps, Manuel draws on the most diverse cultures, from the Lithuanian mystics to India and Sicily, from just-intonation to European-style minimalism. As he has already done in the past, Zurria …
Circular Music (Ext. N° 1 / N° 2 / Ext. N° 2)
Circular Music and Extended Circular Music are two collections of compositions written by Jürg Frey between 2011/2016 and 2014/2015 respectively. The first cycle is composed of seven distinct compositions while the second is divided into nine parts but, in reality, the n. 4 and no. 9 of the second series share the same harmonic progression. What distinguishes them, in addition to the ensemble (no. 4 is for string quartet and piano while no. 9 is for piano.
String Trio
"I wrote the piece on a commission from the Concertgebouw Brugge, and it was premiered by the Goeyvaerts Trio as part of the 2019 Slow Festival. The trio played the piece again after the festival, but I always had the feeling that it hadn’t yet arrived at its final destination. So when the plan emerged to have Apartment House record the trio, I sat down again and worked some more on the piece. It’s not the first time I’ve re-worked ‘finished’ pieces. This is mainly due to my basic way of working…
Les Signes Passagers
'Les signes passagers' is an album of seven pieces for solo fortepiano written by Jürg Frey in 2021, commissioned by the Amsterdam-based pianist Keiko Shichijo. It was premiered by Shichijo on February 5, 2022 at the Concertgebouw Brugge during the Slow Festival. In the same year, Shichijo performed the piece again at the November Music 2022 and later recorded it for this album in April 2023 at the Concertgebouw Brugge in the presence of the composer.
“As a listener, I have experienced with musi…
Continuité, fragilité, résonance
'Continuité, fragilité, résonance' is a 51-minute piece written by Jürg Frey in 2020-2021 for octet: string and saxophone quartets. The Montréal-based Quatuor Bozzini and the Bern-based Konus Quartett premiered the piece in September 2021, and later recorded it for this album with the presence of the composer, during a three-day recording session in August 2022 at the Auditorium of Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland. Both quartets have premiered other works of Frey's in the past and have a d…
Lieues D'Ombres
Swiss composer Jürg Frey and Dutch pianist/composer Reinier van Houdt are reunited on this triple CD, 'lieues d'ombres', after their successful collaboration on 'l'air, l'instant - deux pianos' (elsewhere 014), during which the two built a close rapport.
'lieues d'ombres' contains seven of Frey’s solo piano works, written from 1984 – 2018, including one previously unreleased work, ‘Three Piano Pieces’. All seven pieces were recorded by Micha de Kanter at The Muziekcentrum van de Omroep (MCO) in …
Borderland Melodies
Three wonderful recent compositions by acclaimed Swiss composer Jürg Frey - ‘Movement, Ground, Fragility’, ‘L’état de simplicité’ and ‘Borderland Melodies’. All beautifully played by Apartment House"The original idea had been for a CD of pieces that use both clarinet and bass clarinet, which would have given me the opportunity to play alongside Heather Roche, Apartment House’s regular clarinetist. However, the pandemic intervened and limited my activities as a player. Then I was seriously ill fo…
Wind and Light
Greek composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos has been a member of the Wandelweiser composers collective since 2003. He pursues his own compositional style to create a new kind of tonal music, deeply associated with his individuality and the surroundings of his life in Athens, a unique blend of stoic minimalism, the warm colors of modern romanticism, and the introspective depth of Zen.
"For many years I have concentrated my attention on modal monophonic melodies. In my pieces I want to bring a bala…
L'Air, L'Instant - Deux Pianos
Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming melodies.Frey wrote two compositions for two pianos in 2017-2019: Entre les deux l'instant (2017/20…
Echo.Trio.Fragile.Eyot.
**300 copies** "Taken together, these works not only trigger concentrated, deep(er) listening, making a great case for the importance of silence as a decisive and structural element, but they also stress that the line between a composition and an installation is an imaginary one, or at least much more fluid than one might think." - Guy Peters"Four remarkable avant-garde recordings, two of which document sound installations – gently inspiring." - Kevin Press, The Moderns"I easily admit I don’t kn…
120 Pieces of Sound
Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music while simultaneously maintaining a touch of impressionistic/romantic aesthetics in its roots. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized the musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming me…
Early To Late
Performed by Ensemble Grizzana, Jürg Frey (clarinet), Magnus Granberg (celesta, harmonica & stones), Angharad Davies & Mira Benjamin (violins), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Dominic Lash (double bass), John Lely (electronics, harmonica & stones), Richard Craig (flute & electronics), Philip Thomas (piano), Simon Allen (dulcimer & glass harp), Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (zither & electronics).
Collection Gustave Roud
A double CD with five beautiful pieces that engage with the work of the extraordinary French-Swiss poet Gustave Roud. Performers include Dante Boon, Stefan Thut, Andrew McIntosh and Jürg Frey himself.
“I think my process of work is similar to Roud’s: roaming with my sketchbook, taking a movement here, adding some notes there, following an impression, writing a little melody or a rhythmic constellation, deepening a feeling, extending a pitch, waiting and letting it happen…”
Interview with …
L'âme Est Sans Retenue I
Swiss composer Jürg Frey's six hour long electronic tape piece L'àme Est Sans Retenue I was recorded and assembled in 1997/98 and is now being released for the first time. It is the longest piece Frey has ever composed in his over 40 year career.In this piece, Frey utilized the sounds of field recordings he made in Berlin in 1997 as the source materials, alternately inserted between long stretches of silence. Frey was particularly focusing around that time on how the dynamic relation between sou…
Ephemeral Constructions
University of South Carolina experimental music workshop, Greg Stuart (director). Kallam Ashmore (objects), Brian Bethea (saxophone), Erik Carlson (violin), Eric Dennis (objects), James Easteppe (guitar), Jürg Frey (clarinet), Michael Halbrook (objects), Timothy Hall (guitar), John Kammerer (horn), Aj Karp (objects), Logan Mclean (voice), Lauren Phillips (objects), Brooke Rosenberg (objects), Chris Ruggiero (objects), Jessica Russell (objects), Nikil Sairam (violin), Bailey Seabury (percussion),…
For Clarinet (And Piano)
Three beautiful works for Jurg Frey's clarinet by the Amsterdam-based Wandelweiser composer Dante Boon, with the composer accompanying Jurg on piano on two of the pieces. Amsterdam-based composer and pianist Dante Boon (1973) has been composing since he was 11 years old, playing new music since he was thirteen. He joined a well-known Dutch rock band when he was 24. After its break-up, he worked extensively over the years with composers such as Tom Johnson, Jürg Frey, Antoine Beuger and Sam…
Guitarist Alone
Jurg Frey - guitarist, alone played by Cristian Alvear. A double CD featuring all of Jurg Frey's music for solo guitar, beautifully interpreted by the Chilean guitarist Cristian Alvear, including a new piece written specially for Cristian. “Not one for the impatient listener, this softly entrancing double-disc set contains all the solo guitar music by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey – and that means an awful lot of silence and not a huge number of notes. The first piece, Abendlied, contains exactl…
duos
Since their formation in 1998 at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, duo Contour have commissioned and performed over 40 new pieces by composers from Asia, Europe, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. Their collaborative work has combined the acoustic world of trumpet and percussion with dance, electronics, improvisation, origami, story-telling, theatre and video, as well as and with other musicians in their 'duo Contour plus….' programmes. The duo has been resident at …
string quartets
Material can be anonymous. Consider, for example, the middle voices in medieval hymn books: unadorned, not artful, a simple handiwork, a leisurely alternation of single notes. It might be a scale, or, beyond music, the stones of a wall, not artfully stacked, but simply and properly, the formal idea being nothing other than that of a wall. When I was working on the String Quartet (1988), I encountered the painting of Agnes Martin. I saw clear-cut forms, not overgrown with rhetoric and figuratio…