Hayley-Laufer Duo, "Wandrer I: Liszt/Lost" (Feb. 2, 2019)

UB North Campus

Dorothea Hayley and Manuel Laufer.

The Hayley-Laufer Duo’s first Creative Arts Initiative recital explores avant-garde approaches to the art song in the 21st century, combining dizzying demands of virtuosity with emotional extremes. Pieces by Milton Babbitt, Venezuelan composer Diógenes Rivas, and French composer Pierre Strauch use complex harmonic language and intricate rhythms to test the limits of the Lied genre. Helmut Lachenmann's epic Got Lost pairs idiosyncratic voice and piano writing with dissected, reconstituted, and layered texts as it alternates between transcendence and riotous humour.

Hayley-Laufer Duo performing.

Program

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011), Phonemena (1969) 

Pierre Strauch (b. 1958), New Work (2018) 

Diógenes Rivas (b. 1942), Franz Liszt (2012) 

Helmut Lachemann (b. 1935), Got Lost (2007) 

This performance marked the culmination of the first residency period of the Hayley-Laufer Duo. It was FREE and open to the public. 

Hayley and Laufer will be back for a second residency period in May 2019, which will include a performance as part of the concert series A Musical Feast hosted by the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Information about that program can be found here.

Drawn to the new, the audacious, and the complex, the Hayley-Laufer Duo challenges the boundaries of voice-and-piano composition by commissioning exciting young artists while cultivating a core repertoire of twentieth and twenty-first century masterworks. Their decade-long collaboration has brought them to the USA, Canada, Europe and South America, and traversed centuries of song repertoire with an emphasis on the electrifying music of today.

Vocalist Dorothea Hayley has been a soloist with the Vancouver Symphony, the Bourgas Symphony, the Allegra Chamber Orchestra and Ca-priccio Basel. She has performed in festivals such as the Happening Festival, Gulangyu Piano Festival, Performer’s Voice Symposium, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and the Atempo Festival of Caracas, and with organizations like the SMCQ, Chants Libres, CIRMMT, Codes d’accès, Vancouver New Music, the Little Chamber Music Series That Could and the Land’s End Ensemble. Dorothea recently completed an artist residency at the Banff Centre, and was a visiting artist at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Dorothea holds a Doctor of Music degree from Université de Montréal, and teaches voice at Vancouver Community College. She is the Artistic Co-Director of the Blueridge Chamber Music Festival. 

Pianist Manuel Laufer has presented world premieres at Merkin Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, Bang on a Can, June in Buffalo, and Festival Atempo (Caracas and Paris). He has concertized extensively playing contemporary chamber music, performing canonic works by composers including Babbitt, Cage, Crumb, Lachenmann, and Xenakis in addition to newly commissioned repertoire. His solo work champions modernist voices from his native Venezuela, placing particular emphasis on composer Diógenes Rivas. Currently appointed to the Collaborative Piano Faculty at NYU Steinhardt, Manuel has performed with orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, and appears yearly in the Blueridge Chamber Music Festival and the NYU Summer Piano Intensive. He holds degrees from McGill University and University of California, Irvine, and received a Ph.D. in Piano Performance from NYU Steinhardt.