Apartment House © unknown
Apartment House
Apartment House has been captivating audiences with performances of avant-garde and experimental music for more than 20 years. The group, created by cellist Anton Lukoszevieze in 1995, has performed all over the World, from Moscow to Vancouver and from Barcelona to Vilnius. Recent performances further afield include tours of Russia, Canada and a nine-concert series in Melbourne, Australia.
The ensemble has been a firm fixture on the British concert scene, with regular performances at Café Oto and a recent residency at the Wigmore Hall. Apartment House is the most frequently featured UK ensemble in the history of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and its 2011 concert of music by John Cage sold out the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre earning them a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber Music. The ensemble has made a substantial number of live and studio recordings for BBC Radio 3 as well as live recordings for many European stations including Danish Radio DR, Swedish Radio 2, WDR Cologne, ORTF Austria, Radio France and Deutschlandfunk, Berlin.
Over the past 20 years or so it has championed music by emerging or undeservedly little-known composers and has commissioned over 100 new works. Highlights along the way include Jennifer Walshe’s radical Barbie opera “XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!!”, with performances in six countries, and Saskia Moore’s “Dead Symphony”, a fusion of social documentary, art, biological science and music on near death experiences. Notable portrait events have featured composers Christian Wolff, Luc Ferrari, Alison Knowles, Christopher Fox, Vitalija Gloivackyte, Laurence Crane, Helmut Oehring, Claudia Molitor, David Behrman, Jobina Tinnemans and Richard Ayres.
Unusually for a new music ensemble, Apartment House is equally at home at classical music venues (Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre), crossover venues (Cafe Oto), art galleries (Serpentine Galleries, Turner Contemporary, Whitechapel Gallery) and international festivals (HCMF, MaerzMusik, Wien Modern, Ultima, Witten New Music Days), demonstrating its appeal to a wide range of audiences.
Over the years Apartment House has gradually increased its recording output, focusing on key releases by experimental composers such as George Maciunas and Laurence Crane, which received widespread acclaim (‘compellingly beautiful’ The Guardian). The group recently began a long term relationship with the UK label Another Timbre, releasing albums of music by Joseph Kudirka, James Saunders, Chiyoko Slavnics, Linda Catlin Smith and Martin Arnold.
Their recent 20th Anniversary series (2015/16) included a concert at Wigmore Hall, featuring three newly commissioned works, one of which was awarded a British Composer Award in the Chamber Music category (Leo Chadburn “Freezy Water”); a concert series at Cafe Oto; world premieres of works commissioned through Sound and Music’s Embedded scheme; a Christian Wolff feature at the new pavilion of the Serpentine Galleries; two concerts at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and a performance of Saskia Moore’s Dead Symphony at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as part of a Bill Viola exhibition. Several of the concerts were broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Their performances of the music of Julius Eastman at the 2016 London Contemporary Music Festival also received critical acclaim.
2017 saw Apartment House performing in France, Norway, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Canada and the UK. The group also participated in a large scale research project in collaboration with Huddersfield University, culminating in a full performances of John Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra” and a new work by US composer Christian Wolff, commissioned by the Hinrichsen Foundation and the Ernst von Siemens Foundation. As part of Sound and Music’s embedded scheme, they have also commissioned new works from Polish composers and sound artists Robert Piotrowicz and Michał Libera, recently performed at the Sacrum Profanum Festival in Krakow. They were resident ensemble at the London Contemporary Music Festival in December, 2017.
As of January 2018