DeutschThe Incense of Music No. 7
A multisensory concert – Wednesday, 16 December 2015, 7:30 pm
Arkady Shilkloper: French horn, flugelhorn, alphorn, didgeridoo
Incense: Birch (Russia), Juniperus Communis (Germany)
Circle 1 Berlin – Platform for Art and Culture, Mittenwalderstrasse 47, 10961 Berlin Kreuzberg — circle1berlin.com
The seventh concert of the series "The Incense of Music" is again a big thing: Arkady Shilkloper, one of the world's greatest horn players, interacts in his solo performance with the exhibited artworks by Yinon Avior, Alexandra Baumgartner, Benand Sebastian, Matti Isan Blind, Noa Gur, Ella Littwitz, Ronit Porat, J&K/Janne Schäfer and Kristine Agergaard, Johannes Vogl, Ulrich Vogl and others, and with two exclusive fragrances burnt in different sets. The classical-jazz-worldmusic-folk-and-whatever musician has chosen Russia's national tree, birch, and German juniper for his performance at Circle 1.
Artwork by Giuseppe Centrone
Artists
Arkady Shilkloper — French horn, flugelhorn, alphorn, didgeridoo
Arkady Shilkloper (born 17 October 1956) is a Russian multi-instrumentalist — horn, alphorn, flugelhorn — and composer now based in Germany. Born in Moscow, he began playing alto horn at the age of six. After two years of military service, he studied at the Moscow Gnessin Institute from 1976 to 1981, joining the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre at the same time and beginning his first ventures into jazz. In 1984 he formed a duo with fellow Bolshoi musician, bassist Mikhail Karetnikov, recording the album "Dvizhenie" together. From 1985 to 1989 he played with A. Kirichenko and S. Letov in the trio Tri-O. Since 1988 he has collaborated with pianist Mikhail Alperin, first as a duo and, from 1990, together with Sergey Starostin as the Moscow Art Trio — an ensemble with numerous recordings and international festival appearances to its name. He has performed with Lionel Hampton, Lew Soloff, Elvin Jones, Howard Levy, Louis Sclavis, Christian Muthspiel and the Vienna Art Orchestra, among others, and released five solo albums, including "Hornology" (1995) and "To the Summit and Back" (2007). Since 1994 he has been a member of the ensemble "Pago Libre". In 2004 he premiered the Concerto for Alphorn and Orchestra written for him by Daniel Schnyder at the Menuhin Festival Gstaad. Since 2004 he has also performed as a soloist with the Strasbourg-based VSP Orkestra. In 2015, Jazzahead presented his duo with the young Ukrainian jazz pianist Vadim Neselovskyi. Shilkloper is widely regarded as one of the musicians who helped shape extended playing techniques for both French horn and alphorn.
Photo by Fabio Dondero
Incense
Birch is a slender, deciduous hardwood tree with distinctive pale, often paper-like peeling bark, found across much of the Northern Hemisphere, from temperate to boreal climates. As one of the first tree species to colonise bare or disturbed ground, it has long been seen as a symbol of new beginnings. Its light, fine-grained wood is used for instruments, veneers, and — thanks to its excellent resonance — speaker cabinets, while its bark is tapped for traditional birch sap.
Burned as incense, birch releases a bright, fresh, faintly green-resinous scent with no heaviness at all. In Celtic tradition, birch stands for growth, renewal and adaptability, and its smoke is still used today to symbolically clear a space or mark the start of something new, unburdened by what came before.
Common juniper is a hardy, often low-growing conifer with the largest natural range of any woody plant on earth — spanning from the Arctic down through temperate mountain regions of North America, Europe and Asia. Its needle-like leaves grow in whorls of three, and its berry-like, blue-black cones take around eighteen months to ripen. The slow-growing, dense wood is prized for its pleasant scent and decorative grain.
Burned as incense, juniper gives off a clear, resinous-fresh scent with a faint, berry-like sweetness — invigorating yet grounding. Across much of Northern and Central Europe, juniper smoke has traditionally been used to cleanse spaces and ward off negative influences, a use closely related to frankincense that earned it the folk name "German sandarac".