Reviews and occasional notes on classical music "Music, both vocall and instrumental, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so super excellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like." - Thomas Coryat, after hearing 3 hours of music at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, 1608.
Showing posts with label Esa-Pekka Salonen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Esa-Pekka Salonen. Show all posts
Esa-Pekka Salonen's impressive new Cello Concerto had its origin in his 2010 work for solo cello "knock, breathe, shine".
I decided to use some phrases from my 2010 solo cello work knock, breathe, shine in the second and third movements, as I always felt that the music of the solo piece was almost orchestral in its scope and character, and would function well within an orchestral environment.
As it happens, I've been listening to a brand-new recording of Salonen's solo cello music, by Wilhelmina Smith. It's fascinating to hear that piece opened up, like a stage play made into a fine film. Along the way Salonen adapted the second movement, "breathe", as the lovely Dona nobis pacem for unaccompanied children's choir. The transformation of this material in the Cello Concerto is a more subtle metamorphosis. "I imagined," the composer says in his illuminating liner essay, "the solo cello line as a trajectory of a moving object in space being followed and emulated by other lines/ instruments/moving objects." The Concerto is certainly no pot pourri of previously used material and virtuosic pyrotechnics, but something much more organic. Yo-Yo Ma is of course the star of the show here, but the orchestral score is also written for virtuoso players. Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic players know each other very well, of course, and there is a feeling of inevitability about this recording project. It was meant to be, and exactly the way it sounds here.
With his works for solo cello and solo violin J. S. Bach left all the composers after him a superb template for stripping down music to its essential character, but also the fearsome task of trying to approach the profound mysteries he expressed. In a beautifully curated assortment of works by two of today's greatest composers, Wilhelmina Smith illuminates the strategies Esa Pekka Salonen and Kaija Saariaho use to bring make complex music from a solo line in the 21st century.
In his important 1960 essay "Modernist Painting", Clement Greenburg talks about how modern painters embraced the limitation of expressing a three-dimension world on a two-dimensional surface: "Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else." The flatness that evolved from Manet to Ellsworth Kelly is an analogue for what Salonen is doing in his series of works for solo instruments entitled Yta (Swedish for “surface”):
I wanted the
form (which in these pieces is equivalent to the process) to be constantly
audible, in other words on the surface, and no hidden structure. Everything
is transparent, and the listener has no difficulties following the process
because there is only one musical plane.
The listener may have no difficulties, but the complexity of this music means that the cellist is tasked with an enormous virtuoso job, which Wilhelmina Smith handles here with, as they say, aplomb.
My favourite work on the disc is Salonen's "Knock, breathe, shine", which is one of the great works for the solo cello after Bach. The striking use of pizzicato effects in the first movement sets up a bewildering, mind-boggling series of sounds, and one is in awe of both the ingenuity of the composer and the skills of the cellist. But virtuosity isn't paramount here, since there are important musical and even spiritual dimensions that are much more profound than mere display. This is most evident in the still centre of the work, "breathe":
... and here's Salonen's Dona nobis pacem, the work for unaccompanied children's choir adapted from "breathe":
This lovely work isn't the end point for the solo cello piece's metamorphosis; Salonen uses phrases from "breathe" in the second and third movements of his recent Cello Concerto.
The Mystery Variations is a project of the cellist Anssi Karttunen in which the source material is not Bach, but the Chiacona for solo basso by the early Italian Baroque composer Giuseppe Colombi (1635–94). Karttunen commissioned 31 composers to write variations on this piece. Smith plays the simple work, and then the variations written by both Salonen and Kaija Saariaho. Saariaho's Dreaming Chaconne is an eerie doppelgänger of Colombi's simple theme; I thought immediately of the scene in Alex Garland's film of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, where the humanoid figure mimics the main character. Salonen's variation, Sarabande per un coyote, goes far afield both in story-telling terms and harmonically. These two pieces together with the original theme make an arresting work; I can't imagine many of the other 29 variations being at this level!
Smith ends her programme with a clever work by Kaija Saariaho, Spins and Spells, a piece written in 1996 for the scodatura (re-tuned) cello, which gives the work an antique air. It's an evocative, thought-provoking piece of music, and a fitting end to one of the most diverse albums I've listened to in years.
