Georges Lentz


Georges Lentz is a contemporary composer and sound artist, born in Luxembourg in 1965, and is that country's internationally best-known composer. Since 1990, he has been living in Sydney, Australia. Despite his relatively small output and his reclusiveness, he is also considered one of Australia's leading composers. He spends part of each year at his secondary residence in Berlin.
In 2019, a new sound art project, the Cobar Sound Chapel, will be built in Cobar in Outback New South Wales. It will be a purpose-built venue to permanently house the 4-channel projection of Georges Lentz's digital string quartet, the 369-minute composition String Quartet, as well as the venue for a new annual String Quartet Festival Weekend. The Cobar Sound Chapel will be designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Australian architect Glenn Murcutt in collaboration with the composer, with its architecture reflecting rhythmic and structural patterns found in String Quartet.

Life

Born in Luxembourg City on 22 October 1965, Georges Lentz grew up in the Luxembourg town of Echternach. He studied at the Luxembourg Conservatoire and later at the Paris Conservatoire and the Musikhochschule Hannover. In 1989, he began working on a cycle of compositions under the name "Caeli enarrant...". His music is being recognised increasingly around the world, with performances at the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Musikverein and Konzerthaus, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Wigmore Hall London, Carnegie Hall New York, Kennedy Center Washington, Suntory Hall Tokyo, Sydney Opera House. Many leading orchestras have performed his works, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra London, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hallé Orchestra Manchester, Deutsches Symphonieorchester Berlin, Bamberger Symphoniker, Kölner Philharmoniker, Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, ORF Symphony Orchestra Vienna, Warsaw Philharmonic, St Louis Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, Melbourne Symphony... His orchestral work Guyuhmgan, from part VII of this cycle, was the foremost recommended work at UNESCO's 2002 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. His latest compositions include a work for viola, orchestra and electronics called Monh written for German viola soloist Tabea Zimmermann, as well as Ingwe for solo electric guitar, written for the young Australian guitarist Zane Banks.
Being given to self-doubt and reclusiveness, Georges Lentz rarely publishes new works and rarely accepts commissions. He is said to retire to an abbey or the Australian desert to find inspiration and compose, and only very rarely gives interviews. Lentz didn't attend the 2009 APRA Classical Music Awards ceremony at the Sydney Opera House to accept that year's top prize for Best Composition by an Australian Composer, instead sending guitarist friend Zane Banks to pick up the award and read out his acceptance speech. A 40-minute documentary about the birth of Ingwe which appeared on YouTube in May 2010 shows Lentz for a total of about 30 seconds.
In the 2012–2013 season, Georges Lentz was in residence at the :de:Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia|Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany and collaborated with Jonathan Nott and the Bamberger Symphoniker.
In January 2015, a new orchestral work, Jerusalem was premiered by the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra. In May 2015, a portrait concert of Lentz's music by the Munich Chamber Orchestra at the Pinakothek der Moderne included the world premiere of the definitive version of Birrung for 11 strings. In November 2016, the final version of Jerusalem was premiered at Wien Modern.
Georges Lentz's music is published by Universal Edition in Vienna.

Music

Georges Lentz's works express his fascination with astronomy as well as his love of the Australian Outback and Aboriginal art, and reflect his spiritual and existential beliefs, questions and doubts.
The Vale of Glamorgan Festival, where Lentz was a featured composer in 2006, introduced his music as "...an awestruck and almost fearful response to the beauties and mysteries of the universe; a massive, personal creative undertaking from which this intense, almost obsessive composer is painstakingly extracting concert works...a unique voice whose music is genuinely moving despite its brittle austerity and unearthliness, and captures some of the most evocative silences imaginable."
Georges Lentz's music is highly original, while showing the influence of the French Spectralists and, to some degree, the New Complexity movement. It is often soft, fluctuates between polyphonic intricacy and fragile monody and sometimes contains extended silences. In its searing intensity and its often psychedelic colours, it has an almost 'visionary' slant to it.
Lentz's scores of recent years are written in an unusual rhythmic system, where each bar contains four beats, but the beats can be of different lengths. While it is not clear why Lentz has adopted this idiosyncratic system, the sophisticated textures and colours superimposed over the top of these rigid "grids" render the music far from monotonous or square and frequently give it an extraordinary shimmering or 'twinkling' quality.
Another feature particularly of his recent orchestral works is a refined and instantly recognisable sense of harmony incorporating both microtonality and, now and then, an austere sense of 'twisted' tonality, with the occasional harmonic progression fleetingly reminiscent of Schumann or Bruckner. However, these chorale-like fragments are always brief and buried in the texture of the music, giving the impression of something "long forgotten".
Georges Lentz has said that in recent years he has been increasingly interested in, and influenced by, the practices of musical improvisation, music technology, sound art and digital art.
One of his latest works, Ingwe, is a monumental 60-minute work for solo electric guitar, possibly the longest solo composition ever written for the instrument. It contrasts sharply, in many ways, with Lentz's prior music and takes the electric guitar into dimensions previously unexplored in a 'classical' context. Ingwe also contains, for the first time in Lentz's output, a short section that relinquishes strict control over the musical material and gives some improvisational freedom to the performer.
The composer's website states that he is currently working on a "kind of string quartet", though what exactly he means by this is as yet unclear. Both Jerusalem and String Quartet testify to Lentz's love of William Blake's visionary epic Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion.
Because of its vast cyclical structure, Lentz's work has been described by British musicologist Chris Dench as "almost proustian" in nature. For the same reasons it has occasionally been compared to Balzac's literary cycle La Comédie Humaine. There seems however to be little relation between Lentz's music and these writers apart from the obvious structural parallels and perhaps a certain panoramic view of the world.
In the final analysis Lentz's music, born from "total silence and radical isolation – at the very real risk of hearing nothing at all", seems to be torn between intense feelings of awe and an over-riding struggle with spiritual doubt and existential loneliness.

Principal works

''Caeli enarrant...'' (1989 to date)

Recordings

•"Caeli enarrant..." III, "Caeli enarrant..." IV, Birrung & ''Nguurraa
Ensemble 24 / Matthew Coorey
•Ingwe
Zane Banks
•Ngangkar & Guyuhmgan
Sydney Symphony Orchestra / Edo de Waart
ABC Classics
•Ngangkar, Guyuhmgan & Monh
Tabea Zimmermann / Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg / Emilio Pomarico

Awards