Barbara Lüneburg

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Barbara Lüneburg

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Goran Kompos is reviewing this year's edition of festival of diverse contemporary music All Frontiers in Gradisce in Italy, where among others, performed Anthony Braxton and Richard Teitelboum, Scanner, David Shea, Merzbow, and others: .... After that, we were witnessing possibly the most beautiful surprise of the festival. In her solo recital, German violinist Barbara Luneburg interpreted compositions of five avantgarde composers and managed to make enthusiastic an audience of hundred-fifty people. The abundant flood of radical approaches in contemporary art rarely catches art consumer off guard these days, but Barbara managed just that. She was digitally processing the sound of her violin, juxtaposing her playing to samples and stroking her bow with her violin. The program was ranging from drone, contemporary classical music, to avantgarde abstractions. The writer of this text was most impressed by a piece which is full of contrasts, where most refined violin squeaking is sporadically alternating with fragments of video takes of passenger planes, sounds of plane engines and cheesy hip-hop tune. Inventive, contrasting and mind boggling interpretation of the piece totally confused senses and metaphysical receptors, which were searching for common denominator in the definition of noise. http://www.radiostudent.si/article.php?sid=17079 (visited on 3.3.09)
THE REFINED EAR - Solo CD - label coviello classics TEMPO, Volume 61 No 239 January 2007, Evan Johnson UK The 'refinements' on offer here come courtesy of a trio of composers in their fifties: the microtones of Georg Friedrich Haas, the harmonics of Salvatore Sciarrino, and the imaginedvernacular of Manfred Stahnke. These disparate creations are held together by Barbara Lüneburg's forceful approach to her instrument, an aggressive passion that seethes beneath lyrical surfaces, waiting to emerge with teeth bared.... The vicious athleticism of this performance makes palpable a tension in Sciarrino's work that recordings usually fail to capture. Finally, Stahnke's Capra requires a violin tuned to a pair of octave-separated fifths (F-C-F-C), and much of the music is accompanied or dominated by a harsh, necessarily vibrato-less open string. After evocation of manic imaginary folk music concludes the disc, though, it is the faultless drama of de terrae fine that sticks in mind, and Lüneburg's biting, passionate performance that make it stay there.
"Best balanced program" Ultraschallfestival, Der Tagesspiegel, 1/27/04 Virtuosic was "Dikhthas" by Xenakis for violin and piano performed by ensemble Intégrales (Barbara Lüneburg violin, Claudia Birkholz piano). On the whole this ensemble presented one of the best balanced programs of the festival. Ludwigshafen, Die Rheinpfalz, 3/6/01 Together with Barbara Lüneburg (viola) the composer and saxophone player Burkhard Friedrich performed his work "Liezwicht" (composed in 1994). Here a viola tuned in a scordatura has to be used with two bows (with and without rosin). The latter glides over the strings without any friction and produces a soft noise. Delicate and hissing sounds, winding lines in the underground, prowling between dream and dawn in an unreal way. Subtle sounds and softly glowling tones showed the twighlight in numerous spectra of colours. Barbara Lüneburg also played Bach's Partita d-minor for violin solo lyrically light, dancingly and beautifully animated.
Schleswig Holstein Musikfestival, Kieler Nachrichten, 8/5/02 In Mauricio Kagel's piece "Klangwölfe" Barbara Lüneburg lets her sordino-violin whirr and rasp and paints a delicate dream landscape in the space. Bregenzer Festspiele...AU- Neue Voralberger Tageszeitung 8/9/01 Reduction to the essential, similar to the "spots" by Frederic Rzewski. Small musical items resound for short moments. The constant rhythm allows the violin (Barbara Lüneburg) to play shining melodies like striking lightnings. With John Cage's piece it is six short inventions: imagination before working out. To show the variety of interpretation, between pizzicato and new spectra of sounds.
Ireland - The Irish Times, Belfast, 3/24/03 Founded 10 years ago by violinist Barbara Lüneburg and saxophonist and composer Burkhard Friedrich, ensemble Intégrales is a flexible contemporary music group which combines electronics with (on this occasion) the distinctive sound of violin, alternating with viola, saxophone, percussion and piano. (...) Styles ranged from the high-impact atonal repeat-patterns of Yannis Kyriakides's "Chaoids" to the dreamy sonority-orientated meditations of Netochka Nezvanova's "untitled", where Barbara Lüneburg drew a sensitive range of sounds from her viola, eventually being joined by Claudia Birkholz (piano) and Stefan Kohmann (percussion).