Masterclass concert
Ich bin der Welt
Artists
- Erminie Blondel, soprano
- Mikko Raasakka, clarinet
- Thomas Tacquet, piano
Programme
Forum Voix Etouffées – au 10.IX.2026
I. Détail des oeuvres
Gustav Mahler, Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen extrait des Rückert Lieder
Alban Berg, Vier stücke op. 5
Pour clarinette et piano, 1913
Vítězslava Kaprálová, Sbohem a šáteček, op. 14, 1937
Alban Berg, Die NachGgall, 1905
Robert Gerhardt, Sonata per a clarinet i piano
Paul Arma, Cinq esquisses pour piano solo
Louis Saguer, Quatre chants populaires sefardis (extraits), 1935-1936
« 1. Alma y vida y corazon »
« 2. Tres hermanicas »
« 3. Cancion de cuna »
Szimon Laks, Huit chants populaires juifs, 1947
Ernst Krenek, Kleine Suite
Ilse Weber, Wiegala, 1944
This program brings together nine composers whose life stories, linked to the various forms of fascism in the 20th century, allow us to navigate, through the lens of musical creation, the political divisions of Europe at that time. Indeed, their works for piano, soprano, and clarinet presented here offer a different way of hearing this history: not as a succession of political labels, but as a plurality of musical responses to violence and loss, bringing into dialogue the radical expressiveness and harmonic tensions of the Second Viennese School, the stylistic metamorphoses of Krenek, Kaprálová’s still largely unknown compositions, the restraint and folk-inspired nuances of Szimon Laks, Ilse Weber, and Paul Arma, and the interplay between Iberian identity and dodecaphonic influence in the works of Gerhard and Saguer.
Opening withIch bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, an excerpt from Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder (1901), this program immediately places the voice in the context of withdrawal, solitude, and detachment from the world. This meditation is countered by Alban Berg’s Vier Stücke, Op. 5 (1913), for clarinet and piano: four intensely concentrated miniatures in which fragmentation, silences, contrasts in tempo, and expressive instability transform the musical gesture itself into a language of inner life. Berg, a student of Schoenberg and a leading figure of the Second Viennese School, belongs to the generation that profoundly transformed the European musical language, a generation that Nazism would later condemn as “degenerate.”
This same dialogue between Viennese modernism and the experience of exile continues in Roberto Gerhard’s Sonata per a clarinet i piano, composed in Berlin in 1928–1929 while he was studying with Arnold Schönberg. This brief, single-movement work, which, despite its title, lacks a true sonata form, reflects Gerhard’s training in dodecaphony and his interest in motivic construction and developing variation. Gerhard, a Catalan composer who fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, was exiled to Great Britain: his inclusion in this program thus broadens the memory of persecution beyond the Holocaust to encompass the political violence that tore Mediterranean Europe apart and its lasting consequences for artists.
In between, with Vítězslava Kaprálová’s Sbohem a šáteček (“Farewell, Little Hat”), composed to a poem by Vítězslav Nezval, the theme of farewell takes on a more directly biographical dimension: written at the end of the composer’s studies in Prague, the song was dedicated to Prague, “the most beautiful city ” in her view, and takes on a deeply moving dimension in retrospect when Kaprálová was forced to leave Prague for Paris and could not return until her death due to the war and her origins.
The second part of this journey focuses more directly on issues of memory, persecution, and transmission. The Eight Jewish Folk Songs by Szymon Laks, who had been deported to Auschwitz and had conducted the camp orchestra there, present melodies drawn from the Yiddish tradition in the postwar period: rather than directly depicting the catastrophe, Laks, immediately upon his return from deportation, helped preserve a culture and a memory that the catastrophe had sought to annihilate. Ilse Weber’s Wiegala, written in the context of Terezín, introduces the voice of a Jewish composer and poet murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, while the Four Sephardic Folk Songs by resistance fighter Louis Saguer open Jewish memory to another diasporic tradition—that of the Sephardic world and Judeo-Spanish. Finally, Paul Arma’s Five Sketches for Solo Piano offer another perspective on a Europe of exile and persecution, allowing the piano, in turn, to become a space of memory.
When viewed together, these diverse repertoires and life stories form a network that extends beyond the boundaries of the Holocaust alone: from Germany and Austria to Czechoslovakia, from Poland and France to Republican Spain and its exile communities, they tell the story of a Europe whose creators were scattered, silenced, or forced to rebuild their work elsewhere. It is from this perspective that the program is part of the European project “Music, Memory, and European Values” by the Forum Voix Étouffées: to give voice to works that persecution, dictatorships, and historical upheavals have marginalized, while refusing to reduce their creators to their tragic fates. Here, memory is built through listening: in a folk melody, a language, an instrumental gesture, a sketch, or a farewell song, music becomes a space where voices threatened with oblivion can once again be heard, and it confronts us with the beauty of the postwar European project.
Bios
Pianist, vocal coach, and choir director, Thomas Tacquet holds master’s degrees in vocal accompaniment and vocal coaching (CNSMD de Paris), as well as bachelor’s degrees in piano and accompaniment (CNSMD de Paris), musicology, and philosophy (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), as well as DEMs (“first prizes”) in choral conducting, harpsichord, and music theory (CRR de Paris). For several years, he has been working as a vocal coach at various French opera houses (Montpellier, Rouen, Reims, Lille, Massy, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées during the 2023–2024) and with various specialized instrumental and vocal ensembles (Le Concert de la Loge, ERDA – Accentus, La Tempête, Le Palais Royal…), while also serving as artistic director for several organizations, including the Forum Voix Etouffées, Opéra Junior, Fiat Cantus, and the musical season of the Amis de la Musique en Vendômois. As the only European artist shortlisted as both an instrumentalist and a choir director at the 2024 International Classical Music Awards, he has, since 2017, produced more than a dozen CDs released by Warner, Bru Zane, Alpha, and Hortus, all of which have been acclaimed by music critics and are dedicated primarily to the study and promotion of little-known French musical heritage. Notable examples include the re-creation of Spontini’s La Vestale, Spontini, in which Thomas Tacquet conducted the Vlaams Radio Koor alongside the Talens Lyriques orchestra (Christophe Rousset); the CD Paul Arma, Chants du silence (2023) as pianist with mezzo-soprano Anne-Lise Polchlopek (featured on the morning show on France Musique, 4 Classica stars), Printemps (Hortus 2022) leading Fiat Cantus and on the keyboards, also awarded 4 Classica stars, and his contribution as vocal coach and artistic advisor to the Accentus CD Canons et Plaisanteries, released as part of the latest complete Beethoven cycle on Warner (2020).
On the research front, since 2021 he has written several album booklets for Château de Versailles Spectacles (Boismortier, Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse; Mozart & Salieri, Requiem…) and contributed to various specialized journals such as Médiévales. After editing critical editions of choral works by Jacques De La Presle and piano works by Joseph Kosma, he is currently working on a keyboard reduction of Clérambault’s cantatas for the CMBV publishing house. Finally, driven by a passion for the visual dimension of music, he has regularly collaborated with directors Alain Garichot, Alexandra Lacroix, Hubert Colas, Charlotte Nessi, and Coline Serreau on productions blending the performing arts and classical music, presented at venues including the amphitheater of the Opéra Bastille, the Opéra de Reims, the Opéra de Vichy, and the Opéra de Massy.
Erminie Blondel, a French-American soprano, has built an international reputation by bringing to life the great roles of the lyric soprano repertoire with the emotional depth of her radiant voice: Violetta in La Traviata, Micaela in Carmen, Missia in The Merry Widow, the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, La Voix Humaine by Poulenc, Marguerite in Faust, Pamina in The Magic Flute, Leila in The Pearl Fishers, Romeo and Juliet, Antonia in The Tales of Hoffmann, Konstanze in The Abduction from the Seraglio, and the title role in Massenet’s Manon.
She has performed at the Monte Carlo Opera, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, the Théâtre du Châtelet, Salle Gaveau, and the opera houses of Marseille, Nice, Clermont-Ferrand, Toulon, Avignon, Saint-Étienne, and Reims, as well as in Italy (Turin, Pisa, Livorno,Lucca, Novara), in China (Beijing, Shanghai), Santiago, Chile, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, as well as with the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Pretoria Symphony Orchestra, Victoria Hall in Geneva, the Athens National Opera for La Traviata on the Acropolis, and at Musiques en Fête at the Chorégies d’Orange, where she triumphed before 10,000 spectators and 2 million television viewers.
Mikko Raasakka graduated from the Sibelius Academy in 2005 with a Doctor of Music degree. Based in Helsinki, Raasakka works extensively as a chamber and orchestral musician, soloist, and writer. He is best known as a performer of contemporary music and has given the premieres of more than one hundred solo and chamber works, including seven concertos. Raasakka plays all modern members of the clarinet family as well as the Finnish folk clarinet liru, the electronic wind instrument EWI, and historical clarinets. He has performed in more than twenty countries on four continents and has made numerous recordings. As a member of electroacoustic ensemble defunensemble Raasakka performs regularly at European contemporary music festivals. He is also a member of Zagros Ensemble. Raasakka has written three books on the clarinet: Aapelin uudet soitteet (2005), Exploring the Clarinet (2010), and Klarinetin tutkimusmatka (2022). He also edited the sheet music collection Suomalainen klarinettikokoelma 1900–60 (2018).
Further information: Jannika Lahin, jannika.lahin@uniarts.fi
Artists
- Erminie Blondel, soprano
- Mikko Raasakka, clarinet
- Thomas Tacquet, piano
Programme
Forum Voix Etouffées – au 10.IX.2026
I. Détail des oeuvres
Gustav Mahler, Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen extrait des Rückert Lieder
Alban Berg, Vier stücke op. 5
Pour clarinette et piano, 1913
Vítězslava Kaprálová, Sbohem a šáteček, op. 14, 1937
Alban Berg, Die NachGgall, 1905
Robert Gerhardt, Sonata per a clarinet i piano
Paul Arma, Cinq esquisses pour piano solo
Louis Saguer, Quatre chants populaires sefardis (extraits), 1935-1936
« 1. Alma y vida y corazon »
« 2. Tres hermanicas »
« 3. Cancion de cuna »
Szimon Laks, Huit chants populaires juifs, 1947
Ernst Krenek, Kleine Suite
Ilse Weber, Wiegala, 1944
This program brings together nine composers whose life stories, linked to the various forms of fascism in the 20th century, allow us to navigate, through the lens of musical creation, the political divisions of Europe at that time. Indeed, their works for piano, soprano, and clarinet presented here offer a different way of hearing this history: not as a succession of political labels, but as a plurality of musical responses to violence and loss, bringing into dialogue the radical expressiveness and harmonic tensions of the Second Viennese School, the stylistic metamorphoses of Krenek, Kaprálová’s still largely unknown compositions, the restraint and folk-inspired nuances of Szimon Laks, Ilse Weber, and Paul Arma, and the interplay between Iberian identity and dodecaphonic influence in the works of Gerhard and Saguer.
Opening withIch bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, an excerpt from Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder (1901), this program immediately places the voice in the context of withdrawal, solitude, and detachment from the world. This meditation is countered by Alban Berg’s Vier Stücke, Op. 5 (1913), for clarinet and piano: four intensely concentrated miniatures in which fragmentation, silences, contrasts in tempo, and expressive instability transform the musical gesture itself into a language of inner life. Berg, a student of Schoenberg and a leading figure of the Second Viennese School, belongs to the generation that profoundly transformed the European musical language, a generation that Nazism would later condemn as “degenerate.”
This same dialogue between Viennese modernism and the experience of exile continues in Roberto Gerhard’s Sonata per a clarinet i piano, composed in Berlin in 1928–1929 while he was studying with Arnold Schönberg. This brief, single-movement work, which, despite its title, lacks a true sonata form, reflects Gerhard’s training in dodecaphony and his interest in motivic construction and developing variation. Gerhard, a Catalan composer who fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, was exiled to Great Britain: his inclusion in this program thus broadens the memory of persecution beyond the Holocaust to encompass the political violence that tore Mediterranean Europe apart and its lasting consequences for artists.
In between, with Vítězslava Kaprálová’s Sbohem a šáteček (“Farewell, Little Hat”), composed to a poem by Vítězslav Nezval, the theme of farewell takes on a more directly biographical dimension: written at the end of the composer’s studies in Prague, the song was dedicated to Prague, “the most beautiful city ” in her view, and takes on a deeply moving dimension in retrospect when Kaprálová was forced to leave Prague for Paris and could not return until her death due to the war and her origins.
The second part of this journey focuses more directly on issues of memory, persecution, and transmission. The Eight Jewish Folk Songs by Szymon Laks, who had been deported to Auschwitz and had conducted the camp orchestra there, present melodies drawn from the Yiddish tradition in the postwar period: rather than directly depicting the catastrophe, Laks, immediately upon his return from deportation, helped preserve a culture and a memory that the catastrophe had sought to annihilate. Ilse Weber’s Wiegala, written in the context of Terezín, introduces the voice of a Jewish composer and poet murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, while the Four Sephardic Folk Songs by resistance fighter Louis Saguer open Jewish memory to another diasporic tradition—that of the Sephardic world and Judeo-Spanish. Finally, Paul Arma’s Five Sketches for Solo Piano offer another perspective on a Europe of exile and persecution, allowing the piano, in turn, to become a space of memory.
When viewed together, these diverse repertoires and life stories form a network that extends beyond the boundaries of the Holocaust alone: from Germany and Austria to Czechoslovakia, from Poland and France to Republican Spain and its exile communities, they tell the story of a Europe whose creators were scattered, silenced, or forced to rebuild their work elsewhere. It is from this perspective that the program is part of the European project “Music, Memory, and European Values” by the Forum Voix Étouffées: to give voice to works that persecution, dictatorships, and historical upheavals have marginalized, while refusing to reduce their creators to their tragic fates. Here, memory is built through listening: in a folk melody, a language, an instrumental gesture, a sketch, or a farewell song, music becomes a space where voices threatened with oblivion can once again be heard, and it confronts us with the beauty of the postwar European project.
Bios
Pianist, vocal coach, and choir director, Thomas Tacquet holds master’s degrees in vocal accompaniment and vocal coaching (CNSMD de Paris), as well as bachelor’s degrees in piano and accompaniment (CNSMD de Paris), musicology, and philosophy (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), as well as DEMs (“first prizes”) in choral conducting, harpsichord, and music theory (CRR de Paris). For several years, he has been working as a vocal coach at various French opera houses (Montpellier, Rouen, Reims, Lille, Massy, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées during the 2023–2024) and with various specialized instrumental and vocal ensembles (Le Concert de la Loge, ERDA – Accentus, La Tempête, Le Palais Royal…), while also serving as artistic director for several organizations, including the Forum Voix Etouffées, Opéra Junior, Fiat Cantus, and the musical season of the Amis de la Musique en Vendômois. As the only European artist shortlisted as both an instrumentalist and a choir director at the 2024 International Classical Music Awards, he has, since 2017, produced more than a dozen CDs released by Warner, Bru Zane, Alpha, and Hortus, all of which have been acclaimed by music critics and are dedicated primarily to the study and promotion of little-known French musical heritage. Notable examples include the re-creation of Spontini’s La Vestale, Spontini, in which Thomas Tacquet conducted the Vlaams Radio Koor alongside the Talens Lyriques orchestra (Christophe Rousset); the CD Paul Arma, Chants du silence (2023) as pianist with mezzo-soprano Anne-Lise Polchlopek (featured on the morning show on France Musique, 4 Classica stars), Printemps (Hortus 2022) leading Fiat Cantus and on the keyboards, also awarded 4 Classica stars, and his contribution as vocal coach and artistic advisor to the Accentus CD Canons et Plaisanteries, released as part of the latest complete Beethoven cycle on Warner (2020).
On the research front, since 2021 he has written several album booklets for Château de Versailles Spectacles (Boismortier, Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse; Mozart & Salieri, Requiem…) and contributed to various specialized journals such as Médiévales. After editing critical editions of choral works by Jacques De La Presle and piano works by Joseph Kosma, he is currently working on a keyboard reduction of Clérambault’s cantatas for the CMBV publishing house. Finally, driven by a passion for the visual dimension of music, he has regularly collaborated with directors Alain Garichot, Alexandra Lacroix, Hubert Colas, Charlotte Nessi, and Coline Serreau on productions blending the performing arts and classical music, presented at venues including the amphitheater of the Opéra Bastille, the Opéra de Reims, the Opéra de Vichy, and the Opéra de Massy.
Erminie Blondel, a French-American soprano, has built an international reputation by bringing to life the great roles of the lyric soprano repertoire with the emotional depth of her radiant voice: Violetta in La Traviata, Micaela in Carmen, Missia in The Merry Widow, the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, La Voix Humaine by Poulenc, Marguerite in Faust, Pamina in The Magic Flute, Leila in The Pearl Fishers, Romeo and Juliet, Antonia in The Tales of Hoffmann, Konstanze in The Abduction from the Seraglio, and the title role in Massenet’s Manon.
She has performed at the Monte Carlo Opera, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, the Théâtre du Châtelet, Salle Gaveau, and the opera houses of Marseille, Nice, Clermont-Ferrand, Toulon, Avignon, Saint-Étienne, and Reims, as well as in Italy (Turin, Pisa, Livorno,Lucca, Novara), in China (Beijing, Shanghai), Santiago, Chile, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, as well as with the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Pretoria Symphony Orchestra, Victoria Hall in Geneva, the Athens National Opera for La Traviata on the Acropolis, and at Musiques en Fête at the Chorégies d’Orange, where she triumphed before 10,000 spectators and 2 million television viewers.
Mikko Raasakka graduated from the Sibelius Academy in 2005 with a Doctor of Music degree. Based in Helsinki, Raasakka works extensively as a chamber and orchestral musician, soloist, and writer. He is best known as a performer of contemporary music and has given the premieres of more than one hundred solo and chamber works, including seven concertos. Raasakka plays all modern members of the clarinet family as well as the Finnish folk clarinet liru, the electronic wind instrument EWI, and historical clarinets. He has performed in more than twenty countries on four continents and has made numerous recordings. As a member of electroacoustic ensemble defunensemble Raasakka performs regularly at European contemporary music festivals. He is also a member of Zagros Ensemble. Raasakka has written three books on the clarinet: Aapelin uudet soitteet (2005), Exploring the Clarinet (2010), and Klarinetin tutkimusmatka (2022). He also edited the sheet music collection Suomalainen klarinettikokoelma 1900–60 (2018).
Further information: Jannika Lahin, jannika.lahin@uniarts.fi