Klangforum Wien

Hyperopia
Dorian Concept

Oliver Thomas Johnson, alias Dorian Concept, began his musical career as a bedroom producer. Nowadays, the Vienna-based electronic innovator plays at clubs as well as at the Royal Albert Hall. For Klangforum Wien, he composed a new piece that could not be premiered at the Vienna Konzerthaus in April as planned due to the lockdown. The forty-minute-long Hyperopia is now scheduled for musikprotokoll 2020. In this piece at the border between digital and acoustic sound generation, the autodidact Dorian Concept, who considers himself as a firm advocate of improvisation, performs as an electronically equipped chamber musician along with Klangforum Wien.

At the beginning of the concert there is a moment of a compassionate and solidary reflection: the trumpet player Marco Blaauw plays the oppressive solo I can’t breathe (2015) by Georg Friedrich Haas, which the composer wrote in memory of African-American Eric Garner, who was murdered by US police officers in 2014. In this way, Haas declares his solidarity with the protesters of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. It is sad to have to mention that this piece is still topical in 2020.

Dorian Concept (born Oliver Johnson, 1984 in Vienna) is an Austrian producer and keyboard artist, whose work draws on an eclectic variety of sources including experimental electronic music, jazz, pop, hip-hop, ambient and soundscape music. He has released albums on labels like Ninja Tune and Brainfeeder and was the tour-keyboarder for Flying Lotus. He is well known for his energetic live performances where he plays on multiple synthesizers with virtuosity.

Born in London, Finnegan Downie Dear is a young conductor who is increasingly recognised for the maturity and intensity of his performances, bringing clarity and vitality to the most challenging of scores. Since graduating with distinction from both Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music, he has worked as an assistant conductor and coach for some of the world's foremost opera companies, including the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Opernhaus Zürich, Bayerische Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festspiele. In 2017, Finnegan was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music.

Klangforum Wien 24 musicians from ten different countries represent an artistic idea and a personal approach that aims to restore to their art something that seems to have been lost – gradually, almost inadvertently – during the course of the 20th century, which gives their music a place in the present and in the midst of the community for which it was written and for whom it is crying out to be heard. Ever since its first concert, which the ensemble played under its erstwhile name “Societé de l’Art Acoustique” under the baton of its founder Beat Furrer at the Palais Liechtenstein, Klangforum Wien has written musical history. The ensemble has premiered roughly 500 new pieces by composers from three continents, giving a voice to the notes for the first time. And from 2009, owing to a teaching assignment at the University of Performing Arts Graz, Klangforum Wien as a whole could style itself “professor”.