Wednesday May 12th at 7:30 PM

19:30 Concert and lecture with Habakuk Traber
Joseph Joachim Concert Hall
University of the Arts Berlin,
Bundesallee 1-12
Admission free

ROBERT HELPS
Fantasy for Violin und Piano
Trio No. I for Piano, Violin and Cello
Trio No. II for Piano, Violin und Cello

FRANZ SCHUBERT
Piano Trio in B-Flat Major Op. 99

ATOS Trio
Annette von Hehn, Violin
Stefan Heinemeyer, Cello
Thomas Hoppe, Piano

Sunday June 20th at 8:00 PM

19:15 Concert lecture with Habakuk Traber
20:00 Concert: Philharmonie / Kammermusiksaal

ROBERT HELPS
Postlude for Piano, Violin and Horn
Second Thoughts for Flute
Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello
Duo for Cello and Piano
Quintet for Piano, Violin, Cello, Flute and Clarinet

JOHN IRELAND
Sextett for String Quartet, Clarinet and Horn

Naomi Niskala, Piano
Annette von Hehn, Violin
Elisabeth Glass, Violin
Ronald Carbone, Viola
Frank Dodge, Cello
Marieke Schneemann, Flute
Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer, Clarinet
Bernhard Krug, Horn

Ticket-Hotline: 030 / 308 785 685,
Ticket Agencies about the city,
Philharmonie Box Office

Robert Helps (1928 – 2001)

In May and June 2010 Spectrum Concerts Berlin will present the entire chamber works of Robert Helps with piano. Two concerts are planned: One in the University of the Arts Berlin and the other in the Berlin Philharmonie. Immediately following these public concerts the works will be recorded in the Siemens Villa in Berlin in cooperation with Deutschland Radio and the label Naxos. Following the release of the CD at the beginning of 2011, Deutschland Radio will promote the recording throughout Germany and other European countries and Naxos will market it internationally as part of its American Classics series.

Composer and pianist Robert Helps, born in Passaic, New Jersey, represents an important part of the USA - Europe cultural connection. He was rooted in an assertive American self-awareness that no longer felt inferior to the high culture of Europe, but brought into the international music scene exemplary composers like Charles Ives, George Gershwin, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, Harry Partch and the minimalists. At the same time he was in close contact with the European immigrants of the thirties and studied, like Astor Piazzolla and Aaron Copland, with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He blend-ed these various influences into a distinctive personal style.

In his aesthetics, Helps is like a natural ally of Spectrum Concerts Berlin, which has since its inception set this transatlantic bridge-making as a continuing and constantly evolving goal. Helps came to Berlin before his death to work with our group and his works have been represented again and again in Spectrum Concerts Berlin programs so that a strong resonance has developed with our performers and our audiences. Just at the beginning of 2010 the Russian pianist Katya Apekisheva presented his piano suite In Retrospect in our series to an enthusiastic response from an audience of over 1000.

So we believe that the time is ripe to offer Robert Helps and his music in a concentrated presentation and discussion. This will certainly be inspiring to the younger generation of composers in Berlin, which is international in its make up. It will also bring together two strands of work of Spectrum Concerts Berlin. One is the chamber music of American composers, specifically Robert Helps, the other is the series of concerts and CD productions dedicated to recalling the painful bridge-making of major German and American composers who immigrated to the USA, among them Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Paul Hindemith and Ernst von Dohnanyi. Uniting these strands of our work moves us toward a larger understanding of how European-American musical life tried, in the intimacy of chamber music, to deal with the disasters of the two world wars, social collapse, and the early cold war period.

"Robert Helps is not only the pianist’s pianist and the composer’s composer, but he is the composer’s pianist and the pianist’s composer, for, since his teen-age performance of music that was deemed unperformable he has played incomparably compositions which other pianists could not or would not perform. The singular pianistic mastery which he brought to these performances moulds his own writing for piano, from which pianists have discovered resources of nuance, rhythmic subtlety, dynamic control and sound which endow their own playing with a new sensitivity and sensibility. His chamber and orchestral compositions are not pianistic transcriptions but the fresh realization of the same awareness in these non-pianistic media. He long has been a legend in his time, and he deserves it. " - MILTON BABBIT (1996)