infotext:
CARNIVAL OF THE INSECTS Dan Dediu was born in Braila/Romania in 1967, in a city about which nothing can be reported. At the age of thirteen he came to the Romanian capital, to the Bucharest music high school. It's winter and the heating has failed again - the years of shortages have already begun. In the ice-cold little room, Dan Dediu sits down at the piano and invents an acoustic counter-world to the reality of life under the regime that remains associated with the name of the dictator Ceaucescu. The room is filled with sounds that the young pianist takes from the repertoire of so-called classical music: From them he fantasizes – to this day – a realm of illusion: a “post-neoclassical” world of colorful dreams. In them, past and present are intertwined to form a magical, utopian place that has been removed from time and is also enlivened by the shadows of female figures from world literature. In his cycle Idylls and Guerrilles two principles are opposed to each other. The lyrical homage to inventions by Cervantes, Goethe or Shakespeare are drawn with a rubato melody in diatonic diction. As an antagonistic counterpart, Dan Dediu invents a complementary genre: »guerrillas« – quarrels which, in tempo giusto, reveal chromatic visions of the spirit beings. Postmodernism is a proven cultural asset in Romania. Even George Enescu juggled several styles at the same time without giving them a hierarchical gradient. Dan Dediu continues this attitude - now as a tradition. But he is not a musical classical scholar. He does not write inventories of classical musical gestures, but combines them with sharp intellectual talent and intersperses them with foreign ingredients. As in the Lévantiques piano cycle. Be it that in Bêtes nostalgiques a passacaglia theme in the left hand meets a strangely deformed, pseudo-baroque melody in the right hand, obliterated in the discourse over the sound of clapping hands. Or as in Le vent du Transylvanie, with its waterfall and volcano gestures from Debussy's Le vent dans la plaine: a secret filigree melody, all filtered and mixed through imaginary, jazzy chord packets - a distant echo of Grieg's Piano Concerto. It can also be more robust, like in Rock'n'roll des bogomiles. Or hypnotic, as in Les barricades mystérieuses – reloaded, in which a subtle web is woven with a character from François Couperin's homonymous piece of spider threads. When Dan Dediu profiles his musical language, Romania is already on the way to an open, democratically oriented society. At the same time, a number of institutions are still active which, in the real socialist era – often in contradictory situations – encouraged the emergence of contemporary art music. Above all, the Composers' Union and the Romanian Radio with its orchestras. In this way, Dan Dediu can try out his symphonic skills early on and develop a completely relaxed relationship with the larger form. An attitude that he transfers to the keyboard in his Fourth Piano Sonata. Dan Dediu has an obsession with form and harmony. His passion leads him into a dialectic labyrinth: intelligently calculated on the large scale, decorated in detail with ornamental aberrations and fixed ideas. His opulent work is an idiosyncratic blend of grand sonata form and a cycle of variations. But the theme is complex and the variations each reflect an aspect of the theme. Everything is grouped around a central trio ardente, which serves as an axis for the two corresponding movement groups – fugue, capriccio, aria, capriccio, minuet. Dan Dediu plays with virtuosity, with pleasure in pianistic charm. He loves wit, comedy and irony, as well as the absurd and grotesque. In his music, Romania becomes an idyll: on an imaginary pastoral meadow, the left hand performs two characteristic gestures of an insect with ballistic accuracy on the piano – jumping and flickering: The Grasshopper. A musical entomology. Thomas Beimel |
program:
15:34 idylls and guerrillas Op. 76 (1998) [07] 06:42 p.m The Grasshopper Op. 112 (2006) From the cycle Levantiques Op. 64 (1997) 23:39 Sonata No. 4 Op. 60 (1996) [20] 03:45 p.m Les barricades mystérieuses – reloaded (2006) Total time: 59:14 Dan Dediu, Piano |
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