Großer Kunstpreis Berlin 2020 at MaerzMusik. Younghi Pagh-Paan

To celebrate the awarding of the Großer Berliner Kunstpreis to the composer Younghi Pagh-Paan, this concert with Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin (KNM Berlin) presents a selection of her works spanning a period of five decades.

Younghi Pagh-Paan's music – “so free and so fine”, as it was aptly described – speaks to the condition of the present in a moving way. Rooted in her formative experience of migration and her persistent practice of intercultural dialogue, the work of the South-Korean composer, who made Germany her new home in 1974, fosters a circumspect vision of a life free of colonial domination, boundless commercialization and the violence of globalization. Carried by a Tao-influenced ethics, her musical aesthetics is inextricably linked with a politics of care rarely to be found in contemporary music. To celebrate the awarding of the Großer Berliner Kunstpreis, this concert with KNM Berlin presents a selection works by Younghi Pagh-Paan spanning a period of five decades, from her early “Man-Nam I”, in which sounds of traditional Korean instruments are artfully interwoven, until her recent First String Quartet.

Programme

Younghi Pagh-Paan

MAN-NAM I
for clarinet, violin, viola and cello (1977)

ma-am / Mein Herz
for female voice solo (1990)
based on a poem by Chung-Chul

U-MUL / The Well
for seven instrumentalists (1992)

Mein Herz III
duo for soprano and viola (2020)
based on a poem by H. C. Artmann
World premiere

Horizont auf hoher See
for string quartet (2016)

Artist Talk
Lydia Jeschke in conversation with Younghi Pagh-Paan, Laureate Großer Kunstpreis Berlin 2020

Cast
Ensemble KNM Berlin
Angela Postweiler (soprano)