Gareth Davis, Exaudi Vocal Ensemble, Fumio Yasuda
Biography Gareth Davis, Exaudi Vocal Ensemble, Fumio Yasuda
Exaudi Vocal Ensemble
Founded in London in 2002, Exaudi is one of the UK's leading vocal ensembles. It is world-renowned for its performances of the radical currents of vocal chamber music, whether the avant-garde of the late Renaissance (Vicentino, Luzzaschi, Monteverdi, Gesualdo) or the music of the present day, working equally with complexity, microtonality and experimental aesthetics. Recent new music is central to the ensemble's repertoire, which has premiered many works by the leading composers of our time, from Sciarrino and Ferneyhough to Cassandra Miller and Jürg Frey, nationally and worldwide. A consistent feature of Exaudi's programming is the blending of contemporary music with medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music. In 2019, Exaudi released its first recording exclusively of early music works, Carlo Gesualdo Madrigali, on Winter & Winter, which won the German Record Award and was selected as one of BBC Radio 3's CDs of the Year.
Exaudi's numerous international engagements have taken the ensemble throughout Europe, often in collaboration with leading orchestras. Exaudi receives regular airplay on BBC Radio 3 and European radio stations, and has released seven recordings on the Winter & Winter label.
Gareth Davis
born in England, is an artist, composer and musician living in Amsterdam. He plays clarinets, the result of a more or less spontaneous purchase while window shopping in Covent Garden in London. The fortunate location of a wonderful (and, equally important, quite inexpensive) second-hand record store a few steps from the bus stop to get to school for seven years and the daily newspaper delivery led to a somewhat multi-layered, generally unclassifiable musical taste.
His activities range from sound art and contemporary classical music to rock, improvisation and noise, collaborating among others with composers such as Bernhard Lang, Peter Ablinger, Toshio Hosokawa and Jonathan Harvey, and as a soloist with orchestras such as the SWR Synphonieorchester, Warsaw Philharmonic and Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid, performances with groups and performers ranging from the Neue Vocalsolisten and the Arditti Quartet to improvisers Elliott Sharp and Frances Marie Uitti, electronic artists Robin Rimbaud and Merzbow, and multimedia work with artists such as Christian Marclay and Peter Greenaway.
Gareth Davis performs on "The Ninth Wave - Ode to Nature," released by Winter & Winter, nine compositions by Fumio Yasuda based on works by Ludwig van Beethoven.
Fumio Yasuda
was born in Tokyo, where he lives and works. He studied classical composition at Kunitachi College of Music and soon found great interest in working with improvised music as well. Fumio Yasuda cites the late Romantic compositions of Franz Schmidt as decisive influences, as well as John Cage's border crossings. In 1995 he began his musical collaboration with Japan's most famous photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Yasuda's compositions for Arakinema combine Araki's imagery with soundscapes and music to create a total work of art. Arakinema is performed all over the world and causes a sensation in houses like the Wiener Secession, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, various Art Spaces in New York and last but not least in Tokyo.
In the late 1990s, Araki introduced pianist and composer Fumio Yasuda to Stefan Winter. Since 2000, Yasuda and Winter have been working together, realizing recording art, sound art works, installations and art performances such as "On the Path of Death and Live" in New York and Munich, "Poem of a Cell" in Tokyo, San Sebastian, Haifa, Bordeaux, Munich, and "The Ninth Wave" in Tokyo, Munich and Istanbul. He has composed numerous film scores, including "Help Me Eros," selected for the Venice International Film Festival. As a composer and pianist, he performs with leading ensembles and is at home in both jazz and contemporary music.
