Composer Christian Wolff and Apartment House ensemble presented a music performance in the Serpentine Pavilion.
Christian Wolff (born 1934, Nice, France) is a composer, teacher and sometime performer. Since 1941 he has lived in the USA. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition briefly with John Cage, in whose company, along with Morton Feldman, then David Tudor and Earle Brown, his work found inspiration and encouragement, as it did subsequently from association with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew. He has also had a long association with Merce Cunningham and his dance company. As an improviser he has played with AMM, Christian Marclay, Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe, Steve Lacy, Larry Polansky and Kui Dong, among others. Academically trained as a classicist, he has taught at Harvard, then from 1971 to 1999, in music, comparative literature and classics, at Dartmouth College.
Apartment House was created by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze in1995. Under his direction it has become a venerable exponent of avant-garde and experimental music from around the World. Disregarding style, fashion and hip things, and forging nowhere with a Zeitgeistian zeal, Apartment House’s performances have included many UK and World premieres of music by a wide variety of composers. The Apartment House group is of a flexible instrumentation, allowing for a vast range of performance possibilities. They are a regular feature on the European music scene and have even ventured as far as the USA, Russia and Australia. Their recordings and videos have been released on LMIC (George Maciunas Musical Scoring Systems), Another Timbre (Laurence Crane Chamber Works) Mere Records (Jennifer Walshe’s XXX Live_Nude_Girls!), Cold Blue Music (Peter Garland String Quartets), Matchless Recordings (Cornelius Cardew Chamber Music). In 2012 they received the Royal Philharmonic Award for Outstanding Contribution to Chamber Music and Song. Their recent double album of music by Laurence Crane has received critical acclaim – described as “compellingly beautiful” by The Guardian.
