Album ImageAlbumRelease date:
09.09.2016

Arash Safaian, Sebastian Knauer, Pascal Schumacher, Zürcher Kammerorchester

ÜberBach

The ÜberBach album is a collection of compositions by the Munich-based composer Arash Safaian on themes by Johann Sebastian Bach. Safaian starts off with various pieces by Bach – chorales, orchestral works, organ and clavier music – and works with them to create five concertos for piano, vibraphone and chamber orchestra. These works are new compositions after Bach. Arash Safaian’s musical partner is the internationally acclaimed pianist Sebastian Knauer: “When I heard the first example of ÜberBach, I was enthusiastic about the project at once. The virtuosity of the piano part, the melodiousness of the compositions and the closely woven sound made a deep impression on me. I imagined I was listening to Bach and yet it sounded too modern for the original.” Sebastian Knauer called his long-time musical partner, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the very next day. He organized the recording and further developed the project with Safaian. For the shimmering crystalline sound, the duo recruited the Luxembourg-born multi-percussionist Pascal Schumacher. He plays the vibraphone, which blends with the piano. There is also a synthesizer to enrich the sound of the basso continuo – for which Bach used the organ. The project centres on the idea of creating a form of music in which one hears Bach without Bach being heard. Arash Safaian develops the music ideas already contained in the compositions of Bach and interprets them anew: “For me, Bach’s works are music in its purest form. They require no deconstruction, no historical classification. What I always think is that I am hearing the grammar of music. That is why I have decided to compose music about Bach’s music. That makes it like a view into a landscape that your own eye interprets in a certain way.”

Arash SafaianSebastian KnauerPascal Schumacher
Arash Safaian

Arash Safaian

Arash Safaian is artist, composer and producer. He is the son of artist Ali Akbar Safaian, an important representative of Iranian modernism. Born in Teheran, he grew up in Bayreuth, where he was exposed to Richard Wagner’s operas at an early age. Alongside his interest in music, painting and sculpture shaped his childhood and youth. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nürnberg and showed his series of pictures in solo and group exhibitions, before moving to the Munich College of Music and Drama to study composition. He has made his mark as a composer with orchestral works, ensemble pieces, film music and operas – in New York (on the beach) directed by Robert Wilson at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, in Berlin (Exit Paradise) at Oper Neukölln and in Munich (At Stake) at the Opera Biennale. Safaian has won the Composition Prize of the Reinl Foundation in Vienna, the Günther Bialas Prize and Bavaria’s e-on Arts Prize. He has held scholarships from the Villa Concordia Bamberg, the City of Munich and Cité des artes Paris.

Photo: Gregor Hohenberg

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Sebastian Knauer

Sebastian Knauer

Having made his concert debut at the age of 14 in the Laeiszhalle in his native city of Hamburg, Sebastian Knauer can already look back on a concert career lasting more than a quarter of a century. He has played in over 50 countries on four continents, appearing in such prestigious venues as the Berlin Philharmonie, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, London’s Wigmore Hall, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Lincoln Center in New York and the NCPA in Beijing. He is a frequent festival guest in Schleswig-Holstein, Dresden, and the Rheingau, at the Ruhr Piano Festival, Bonn’s Beethovenfest, the Schubertiade in Hohenems and the Salzburg Festival, and in Gstaad, Montreux, Aix-en-Provence, Bath, Istanbul, Ravinia, Savannah and Shanghai. Sebastian Knauer’s highly extensive and varied repertoire is reflected in his 15-plus CD releases to date. His most recent recordings Bach & Sons and Vienna 1789, both with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra under Sir Roger Norrington, won generous praise: “Brilliant” (Stern), “Fantastic” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), “Excellent” (Die Presse Wien).

In 2005, East meets West, a joint project with his duo partner Daniel Hope, was awarded the ECHO Klassik and a Grammy nomination. The Hamburg Philharmonic have performed with Sebastian Knauer in a cycle of all 27 Mozart concertos and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra have played all the Haydn concertos, in each case to his direction from the keyboard. He has also performed in concert with the Dresden Staatskapelle, the NDR Symphony Orchestra, the Konzerthaus Orchestra of Berlin, Philharmonia Zürich, Camerata Salzburg, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Lucerne Festival Strings, Orchestre de Chambre de Paris and the New York City Opera Orchestra, conducted by Fabio Luisi, Thomas Hengelbrock, Neeme Järvi, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Ingo Metzmacher, John Axelrod, Simone Young, Michael Sanderling and Jaap van Zweden. An artist with a close affinity with chamber music, he has contributed to numerous projects with such impressive colleagues as the Emerson String Quartet, Philharmonia Quartett Berlin, Sol Gabetta, Sabine Meyer, singers Anne Sofie von Otter, Bernarda Fink, Michael Schade, Olaf Bär and the late Hermann Prey, and with choreographer John Neumeier and the drummer of “The Police”, Stewart Copeland. Already this century he has put together a series of Word meets Music programmes, always focusing on one composer. Sebastian Knauer creates the texts about the composer’s life, which are recited on stage by noted actors. With well over 300 appearances in this format since 2001 he regularly plays alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer, Hannelore Elsner, Martina Gedeck, Katja Riemann, Iris Berben, Gudrun Landgrebe and Barbara Auer. 2012 saw Sebastian Knauer establish his own festival, mozart@augsburg, of which he has assumed artistic direction.

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Pascal Schumacher

Pascal Schumacher

Pascal studied classical percussion, jazz vibraphone and musicology at music conservatories in Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Brussels and The Hague. He holds a Master’s Degree in musicology from the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, and another in music with a focus on jazz vibraphone from the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague. He has won many awards, including the Belgian Django d’Or (2005), Music:LX (2012), ECHO Jazz (2012), JTI Trier Jazz (2014), was selected for the Rising Stars program organized by the European Concert Hall Organization (2009 / 10) and appeared as soloist in ECHO Klassik 2017 awarded project Überbach.

He played with many of exciting musicians such Francesco Tristano, Bachar Mar-Khalifé, Jef Neve, Kenny Barron & Magic Malik, wrote music for theater and film and leaded a jazz quartet. Today he mixes emotional classical music with minimal electronic sounds, although Schumacher himself considers each classification obsolete. To him, music is a single, limitless playground.

2018 also marked a new beginning for Pascal Schumacher, who upon invitation to play at Jazz & The City Festival In Salzburg, started to develop his own solo material. The experience opened up an entirely new path for the composer culminating in his debut solo album, SOL. SOL captures Schumacher’s newfound passion for solitude in all its magnetism all the while remaining true to the main characteristic of his relationship with the vibraphone; intimacy. SOL has ben released via Neue Meister in June 2020.

Pascal is a Yamaha Artist and a Professor for Jazz and Classical Percussion at the Conservatoire de Musique de Luxembourg. - He is the Artistic Director of the innovative 'Reset' Music Festival at Abbaye Neimenster and an Ambassador for SOS Children's Villages International - Luxembourg.

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