Radio Music Shortlist

15 luglio 2020 ore 13:01
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CROATIA
HRT - HRVATSKA RADIOTELEVIZIJA

The Story of the Očić Salon

A respectable family from Zagreb refurbished an old outbuilding, or a barn, situated on their land (which they have owned since the 14th century) not only to live there, but to play music there too. For the past 25 years, the space has been resounding with carefully chosen music played by excellent and respectable musicians at concerts broadcast live by Croatian Radio 3. The Founder and President of the Franjo Dugan Society (which started organising the concerts as get-togethers for its members), Organist Ljerka Očić is also the hostess of the concerts, which are held in her living space. This documentary radioscape recorded at one of the pre-Christmas musical events in the salon provides details from the history of the Očić family, the atmosphere before and after the concert, as well as details about past concerts.

 

GERMANY
ARD - ARBEITSGEMEINSCHAFT DER ÖFFENTLICH-RECHTLICHEN RUNDFUNKANSTALTEN DER BUNDESREPUBLIK DEUTSCHLAND

When Weather was Wildlife

In Werner Cee's radio play, nature triggers fascination, fear, pathos, as well as man's desire to establish himself as the dominating force. Imagination and reality, history and presence – everything is interconnected. These cross references/superimpositions are the musical principle of the piece: drone music and field recordings of natural sounds, accounts of a volcanic eruption in Iceland in 1783, poems on "dominated clouds", Lord Byron's Darkness, chanting to pacify Mount Etna, patents for geoengineering methods. Is it a dystopian scenario (what if the Arctic keeps losing its ice releasing ever more masses of CO2)? With the recording studio being Cee's compositional tool and loudspeakers/headsets the adequate means of reception, radio is the perfect choice of technology with regards to both production and broadcasting.

 

IRELAND
RTÉ - RAIDIÓ TEILIFIS ÉIREANN

Edges of Light

Imagine going to bed on a Saturday night and waking up on Sunday, a half hour older than you should be. Well, that's what happened with the Summer Time Act in October 1916 when Ireland's time-keeping was brought into step with Great Britain, losing 35 minutes in the process. Edges of Light is a collaboration between four traditional Irish musicians who take the concept of this lost time and used it to play with the idea of Time in music, in culture, in life. The performance of traditional Irish music is rooted in the live interaction between the players; all know basic melody but the magic happens in the ability of each to improvise with grace notes, and rhythmic and harmonic variations. Time becomes fluid in that space between the listener and the player, memories are evoked by tunes over a hundred years old. Ghosts emerge.

 

NETHERLANDS (THE)
NPO - NETHERLANDS PUBLIC BROADCASTING

Making an Opera

Radio/Podcast Maker Stef Visjager follows the singers and the artistic team behind the scenes for eighteen months. Visjager shows how every word, every note, every piece of clothing and every prop is the subject of a battle. There are secret love affairs and intrigues. In other words: the making of an opera is often as dramatic as the opera itself. Especially when, right before the opening night, it turns out that years of hard work may have been for nothing.

 

SLOVAKIA
RTVS - ROZHLAS A TELEVÍZIA SLOVENSKA

Water Studies

The composition Water Studies consists of two parts. The first part consists of the author's recordings of frog mating from the environment of Železná Studienka (a part of the Bratislava Forest Park), played/perceived at different speeds, combining them with fictional underwater worlds and a tailor-made generative frog-synthesis. The second part consists of recordings created with the use of laboratory equipment and a self-produced bioreactor for growing algae. The rhythmic bubbling is complemented by a magnetic stirrer creating whirlpool with the use of a glass tube and water. Both parts have a common feature – a study of water rhythms and liquid sounds.

 

SLOVENIA
RTVSLO - RADIOTELEVIZIJA SLOVENIJA

IDEN, Electroacoustic Radio Opera

The musical material of the opera is mostly weaved from human voice. It comprises documentary statements from the management of the Curonian Spit National Park, regarding biologists, tourist workers and the dune inhabitants, poetic writing and musical material reinterpreting the field recordings from the dune. The work is founded on sound specialties of languages (Lithuanian, as a language, is exceptionally musical in nature). In the last part, the human principle is replaced by planthood through field recordings, captured on site. In their struggles to preserve the dune, are humans able to actually "hear" all that? It is a work anchored in sound in order to justify the meaning of sound. To make us sensitive to sound, to promote different ways of listening.

 

UNITED KINGDOM
BBC - BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION

Night Tracks

Hannah Peel presents a nocturnal sonic adventure: a seamless mix, woven together with specially commissioned underscores from the BBC Concert Orchestra, plus natural and manipulated sounds that echo the music that has already been played and that which is yet to come. As always, the show invites listeners to hear the music in contexts that defy expectation. We begin with Anne Müller's orchestra of looped cellos and voices before moving to otherworldly sounds from 17th-century Naples, electronic landscapes from the Scottish-Portuguese artist SHHE and traditional Turkish music honouring the beloved red-crowned crane. At midnight, we see in the new day with the simple beauty of Judith Weir's Piano Concerto, before ending on a darker note with the murder ballad, Two Sisters, in an extraordinary arrangement by Nico Muhly.

 

 

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