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Contents:
Journeys through unknown sound-landscapes- See Siang Wong plays Emmanuel Nunes and Rudolf Kelterbornby Thomas Schacher See Siang Wong was already interested in contemporary music at an early age. In his childhood he experimented at his parents’ piano, plucking the instrument’s strings and knocking the sounding-board. Whilst he followed his traditional piano studies keenly, he was always stimulated by the piano’s colour and – uppermost in his mind – sonority. Delighting in his personal experiments and the guidance of his teachers, See Siang Wong has been able to take for granted much of the ethos of contemporary music. ‘What pleases me at this time,’ says the pianist, ‘is the fact that one does not view such music through the tradition of established convention. With each new work I always start with a completely fresh approach; for example, I find much new techniques and a new sound aesthetic.’ For listeners, such contemporary music offers new experiences; in performance, the fantasy of See Siang Wong taking the listeners’ imagination on a journey through unknown sound-landscapes. The Portuguese composer Emmanuel Nunes came to know See Siang Wong in 2000 at the Tage für Neue Musik Zürich Festival, when he performed the second of the Litanies du feu et de la mer. The 45-minute two-part piano work fascinated the pianist on various levels. There is, at first, through the title – associated with the content – complete conceptions of the infinity of the sea and the intensity of conflagration. The concept of Litanies also in the title is found in the many repetitive elements of the composition, which for See Siang Wong clearly take on a meditative, even religious character. In addition, See Siang Wong senses a connexion with a bridge to Buddhism, as he said, ‘In Buddhism, man places life before everything contemplating with a calm conscience the time spread out before him. The music of Nunes also seems to do this.’ On a more technical level these are interpretative freedoms left to the artist. Within the framework laid down by the composer, the pianist is free to improvise. With such ideas, See Siang Wong feels himself to be in his element. For the listener, this seizing of the moment makes clear the connexion between the artist and his oriental traditions. The Swiss composer Rudolf Kelterborn became friends with See Siang Wong through being colleagues. See Siang Wong gave the first performance of the piano piece Trifolium which Kelterborn extended into a six-part cycle. The third and fifth of these piano pieces are dedicated to See Siang Wong, who gave the first performance of the complete cycle. ‘The contrast between the Swiss Kelterborn and the Portuguese Nunes could not be greater, as may be thought.’ says the pianist. ‘On the one hand, six miniatures, on the other two extensive musical pictures; in one case, concentration, in the other, expansion. What these two cycles have in common is their poetic character.’ Kelterborn has given each of his six studies a title, which hints at their spirit. Kelterborn describes the third as ‘Night-Piece’, and the fourth as ‘Winter music’. See Siang Wong is attracted by such figurative and atmospheric associations, such as may be found in the titles and designations of Debussy. The fifth carries the title ‘Blurred’, indicating something hazy or indistinct. The dynamic level is reduced to pppp; this reduction of sound and the many rests in the piece give a feeling of desolation, which, albeit in a completely different way, may be discerned in the second part of the Litanies, where two of the twelve notes of the scale are being omitted. The contrast between the two compositions of Kelterborn and Nunes is typical of See Siang Wong’s recordings and concerts, in which he tries to build bridges between contrasts of introversion and extroversion, old and new and east and west. These works reflect each other in their contrasts, in that their characters shine forth even more strongly. The Litanies of Nunes, heard against the contrasting foil of Kelterborn’s miniatures, are akin to journeys through a new kind of landscape. Seen against the background of the Nunes, the Kelterborn seems like juggling a series of materials from European musical history. The listener is invited to join in this adventure. English translations: Robert Matthew-Walker
Piano Works by Emmanuel Nunes & Rudolf Kelterborn
Emmanuel Nunes, born in Lisbon in 1941, has established himself as one of the most significant Portuguese composers of his generation, with an extensive body of work covering a wide field. From the first, Nunes aligned himself with the leading movements in contemporary music, including electronic music, and he studied with several of the important figures in post-war European music, including Pousseur and Stockhausen. From 1986 until 1992 Nunes was Professor of composition at the Institut für Neue Musik in Freiburg im Breisgau. From 1992 until 2006 he has taught at the Paris Conservatoire Nationale Supérieure de Musique et de Danse. The large-scale work for solo piano, Litanies du feu et de la mer dates from 1969-71 and falls into Nunes’ early works, in which he has displayed a preference for open forms and spatial instrumental distribution. Clearly, spatial effects are virtually impossible in solo piano music, and the listener’s first impression is of open forms, but such is the inventiveness of this exceptional composer that even within the confines of solo keyboard music a sense of spatial effects is retained. This is because the keyboard is not treated in what might be termed a traditional manner, nor is it assailed with non-musical objects or subjected to changes inconsistent with the instrument as such. In many respects, Nunes rethinks the 88 keys of the modern concert grand piano from a radical perspective, yet at all times he is driven by two things – first, by the nature of his own creative material allied to the extra-musical post-Impressionism of his inspiration, and, secondly, by what he actually causes to ‘happen’ to this material in the course of a lengthy time-span as a consequence of the first. Within this creative duality, in the first part of his structural diptych, Nunes creates a remarkable sound-world of ‘fire’ – beginning, perhaps infused with slight movement, and extending at will, almost as a free-wheeling thing in itself, striking sparks here and there, setting off new ‘fires’, occasionally burning with intensity or dying out. This is an unusual piece of imaginative composition with parts of course left to the inventiveness of the pianist, taken on the wing as it were, at all times ‘observed’, so to speak, by the listener, as we all – composer, pianist and listener – and as See Siang Wong observed, contemplate ‘the time spread out before him’. As this extraordinary movement fades from our perception, could we ask ourselves: ‘Does the fire wholly die? Can we know when the embers are finally extinguished?’ The Sea of the second of the Litanies is not an ocean; it is, in complete contrast to the first, a vividly bright sea-swell, an almost Debussy-like ‘play of the waves’ as the light catches first this and that aspect of the constant living water – human life, in many ways, writ large in an utterly different space-time continuum. Here, Nunes seizes upon the nature of music itself – incapable of expressing anything other than music (albeit inspired by extra-musical happenings), it becomes a living organism in time, controlled and directed by the twin intelligences of, first, the composer and his material, and secondly, by the recreative spontaneity of the sympathetic pianist. The result is a free-flowing flood of ideas, yet within the macro time-span of the individual movement the micro building-blocks of that living organism are conceived and displayed in such a way as to create that ‘spatial instrumental distribution’, of which – as we may hear – Litanies du feu et de la mer is such a striking and powerful example. Rudolf Kelterborn was born in Basle in 1931 and is one of the leading Swiss composers, having produced a very large output of music ranging from opera and other stage works to pieces on the smallest scale, such as we find in several of the Sechs Klavierstücke. Kelterborn has also pursued a distinguished career in music administration, through which he has exerted a strong influence on European music during the past thirty years. The six piano studies See Siang Wong plays are amongst Kelterborn’s more recent compositions, dating from 2001-04. Unlike Nunes’s larger, freer pieces, Kelterborn’s brief, if not aphoristic, pieces are highly organised at almost every level. Yet such organisation does not remove from the pianist elements of fantasy and imagination in performance. The first piece, Trifolium (literally, ‘a genus of small plants of the bean family with three differently-coloured leaves’) translates the literal meaning into musical terms: ‘three-leaved’ as in the initial phrases, yet with the constant capacity for growth and renewal, as the chiaroscuro of the fluttering openings demonstrates, suddenly clenched into three-note chords and then letting fly as soft feathers at will, held in our memory by long use of the underlying sustaining-pedal. The concentration of this piece is remarkable, emanating from the adjacent C-sharp/D sounds, to which Trifolium and many of the succeeding shorter pieces in the cycle return. Trifolium is the longest of the six pieces, and contains all of the material revisited in the succeeding pieces, which for purely mnemonic purposes may be thought of as a set of variations. The second piano piece, ‘a una voce – a due mani’, is a study in single-line composition, excepting for fifteen repeated organ chords at speed, fff, near the close, the piece ending with a peremptory, displosive gesture. The third piece, Nachtstück mit Coda, is virtually self-expressive; texturally constantly fascinating, and melodically so, as half-remembered ideas appear to flit into our consciousness until the piece ends with a direct quotation from the very opening of Trifolium. The fourth piece, Wintermusik, at times appears to freeze the momentum into virtual immobility as the semi-tonal writing clashes gently against itself. This extraordinary study in slow motion is succeeded by Blurred (original English title) to be played ‘fugitively’, as if escaping, combining elements of the single-line second piece with music that constantly seeks to escape from its pursuers – with suggestions of canonic writing to make a finely-judged dramatic miniature. The final piece, Kontrapunkte, brings together the progenitor – the melodic semitone as diminished ninth or sixteenth, or derivations therefrom – into virtual collision with itself until the semitone finally expands into a whole tone (C and D, at a distance) observed from afar by a renegade A flat, when the lines coalesce into high clusters, hit with both hands together at the very top of the keyboard, and the cycle is over. © Robert Matthew-Walker, 2007
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