Music:
MUSETHICA – A viola and guitar evening.
Bach, Schubert, Turina, Piazzolla, and more.
Avri Levitan is an internationally acclaimed violist and the director and co-founder of Musethica. Levitan grew up in Israel, where he studied in the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv and later in the Conservatoire de Paris – Cycle de Perfectionnement. Avri Levitan has established himself as a sought-after soloist, chamber musician and educator performing regularly on many of the most important world stages. He was nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Awards and the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards.
Levitan performed on stages like the Vienna Konzerthaus (Austria), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), Madrid National Auditorio (Spain), Tokio Oji Hall (Japan), Seoul Art Center (South Korea), Beijing Forbidden City Concert Hall (China), Tel Aviv National Philharmonic (Israel), Schleswig Holstein Music Festival (Germany), Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany), Prades Festival (France) and many more.
Avri Levitan is dedicating a large part of his musical life to educating musicians, as a professor for viola and chamber music (CSMA Zaragoza, Spain) and as a guest teacher in many institutes such as the Royal Academy of Music in London, the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, the Central Conservatory of Music and Middle School in Beijing (China), and other institutes in Europe and Asia.
In 2012 Avri Levitan co-founded the educational method and concept Musethica. He is directing all the musical activities in the eight countries where Musethica currently is active.
Guy Woodcock – Born in Israel, Guy Woodcock is a guitarist and guitar teacher living and studying in Berlin.
Having finished his Bachelor’s degree in July 2018 at the “Hanns Eisler” HfM with professor Eugenia Kanthou, Guy is resuming his studies at the UdK Berlin with professor Thomas Müller- Pering. In April 2019 Guy will preform with Trio Tal-Aviv in Hanover where they will premier two pieces written for them by the composer Jean Goldenbaum. In May Guy will participate in the 54. International Instrumental Competition Markneukirchen.
Guy has won second place in Israel’s national guitar competition at the academy of music and dance, Jerusalem, and received the America-Israel cultural fund’s scholarship for 4 years. In 2008 he was accepted to the IDF’s Outstanding Musician program and served in the army band for 3 years. As a member of the Lopez-Woodcock guitar duo Guy entered in the Live Music Now initiative in 2016.
Guy enjoys hiking with his father and does so every summer in the Alps. Guy currently plays an Amalio Burguet cedar top AB-001 2016.
Musethica is a concept and method to educate talented musicians through concert performances as the basic teaching tool while bringing music to a wide range of audiences.
Musethica provides selected musicians accompanied by their mentors the opportunity to perform a large number of concerts as a fundamental part of their education. Led by experienced and carefully chosen mentors, the musicians prepare concert programs of the high quality. Together musicians and teachers perform at least 85 percent of the concerts outside traditional concert halls. The concerts are played for people with physical and mental disabilities, homeless people, refugees, prisoners and seniors, in schools, hospitals, women’s shelters and in many other unusual places.The aim is to play for all parts of society, prioritizing people who are excluded or at risk of exclusion. At most 15 percent of the concerts are played in traditional concert halls. The concerts are always free of charge. Musicians and their mentors perform without remuneration. The goal of Musethica is to establish its method as part of the education in conservatories and music schools worldwide.
Art:
TORBEN GIEHLER
There are numerous ways one can look at abstraction today through the rear-view lens of 20th century history. From the geometric to expressionist, to color field and minimal, the last decade has offered us an early 21st century re-mix of styles and forms with new twists.
Painting has fought off its own obsolescence despite the encroachment of technology. Our visual reference points have been altered, the synaptic response to stimuli modulated through virtual means. Working in a paradoxical position, painters must reconcile the weight of their predecessor’s output and social constructs while conveying something of the surrounding culture that’s contemporary.
For Torben Giehler and his generation of artists who came of age in the late 1990’s and early 00’s, the computer, Internet, and virtual interface brought about a new discourse built around the old (some might say outmoded) cultural signifiers. Reality and perception shifted from an interior state related to the anima of the artistic persona to a mechanistic simulation, a bottomless well where anything might be possible, hence the birth of chat rooms, social networking, and alternate lifestyles such as “Second Life”, and new architectural forms.
As related, the schism of real time in the physical state and the abyss of the virtual ought to be contemplated when considering the paintings of Torben Giehler. Using undulant variations of primary and secondary colors his technique has from the outset of his career consistently engaged the virtual in order to give order to new forms in painting. The rigors of geometric abstraction as influenced by early Modernism right up to Gerhard Richter’s color charts, Neo- geo, and a concern with the topology of architectonic space are his milieu. Natural forms found in the landscape and reworked in Photoshop are often modified into vortexes of overlapping spatial juxtapositions directly by hand on the canvas. Drips and translucent imperfections contrast with straight hard-edged angles, perspective is a harmony of improvised contrariness in subdued and animated shades of color.
Such a methodical filtration of cold digital and actual physical data on canvas is a poetics of free-form structural fragments made whole. Giehler thus reconciles the jagged flaws you might find in a low-res j-peg with the warm uncanny touch of the human
hand.
(MAX HENRY)
