Peter Ruzicka: Orchestra Works Vol. 1

... MEET THE MUSIC ITSELF ...

Compositions for and with orchestra occupy the largest space in Peter Ruzicka's catalog of works. This is not self-evident for an artist for whom modernity remained an intellectual point of reference. The post-war avant-garde exposed itself in ensemble pieces. There was a struggle to cope with the great form and cast. The fact that Ruzicka found the turn to the orchestra out of inner necessity has to do with the peculiarity of his creative imagination. It starts with the sound.

If, from the point of view of »vocabulary composition« (Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht on Gustav Mahler), one wanted to name certain constants around which Ruzicka's musical language crystallized and structured, one would come across a wide variety of sound images and forms of time design. They occur during the nineties, whose aesthetic goal is opera CELAN was, clearly. On the way to the second opera, HOLDERLIN, the composing of sound and memory forms gained richer dimensions. The works on this CD date from the time around and between the two operas.

AFTERHOOD and VORECHO
The great form does not come about by itself. From the early fragmentary compositions to the first full-length opera, Ruzicka went a path of more than 25 years before the form of the stage work crystallized from the experience of ensemble and orchestral pieces. The transition from the first opera to the next involved reflection and probing. AFTERHOOD, immediately after the conclusion of the opera CELAN composed, »refers to the orchestral passages of the opera, transforms them and gains a new dramaturgical context of looking back, of listening back. Musical forms and soundscapes are mirrored, disparate developments 'seen'. During the composition, I had the experience of echoing, which sounded like a constant 'sound shadow'.« (Peter Ruzicka)

PRE-ECHO the composer described as a symphonic study for the opera HOLDERLIN. PRE-ECHO is a sound drama (yet) without words and scene in eight »approaches«. The fivefold irradiation of a "chorale" into a sound field of noises and peripheral tones is followed by a disparate section of shadowy fleeting string actions, which are influenced by timpani, bells and wind signals. In the third part, an instrumental song in a quartet chorus, Ruzicka translates Gustav Mahler's polyphony from independent voices into modern sound thinking. Fragile bridges of sound lead from one section to the next; they have a reminiscent or anticipatory character.

From the first part, a ringed melos leads to the second part; it points to things to come. The high sustained tone of the violins, which leads into the third part, brings the edge tones that framed the events of the first part into the auditory close-up. Only one section seems separate from its surroundings: the fourth, shortest. A cloud of sound breaks into a somber chronometer of regular drumbeats like a chimerical figure and then disappears again. In the score, its outline resembles a symmetrical sculpture. Space and time intertwine in the shape of a cross. The fifth part then seems dark, agitated and infernal.

All sound scenes off PRE-ECHO the composer took over into the opera, partly verbatim, partly extended. The sixth sound pattern opens the second like a vision of imminent torpor and fragmentation HOLDERLIN-Act. A ›canto‹ stretched to the breaking point (this type of instrumental singing goes back as a topos in Ruzicka's music to the XNUMXs) has to assert itself against the percussion in the seventh part. Ruzicka composed the »Finale« as a memory on two different levels: moments of its course point to earlier sections of the PRECHOS return. In the string section of the final adagio, Ruzicka opens up the historical perspective from Mahler to the last string quartets of Beethoven, who was Hölderlin's contemporary.

MEMORIAL per G.S.
On April 20, 2001, Giuseppe Sinopoli collapsed at the podium of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and died that same night. Under the impact of the shocking news, Peter Ruzicka composed MEMORIAL as a requiem for a friend. The beat of time sounds twelve times as a "split column of chords", as a sound and time sculpture that changes particularly in its drum parts and is almost covered by the percussionists towards the middle. Each time it ends differently, now at the edges of what is audible, now in the middle of the strings, now in a chord framework made up of the tones G-Es-E-E-Es, the letters from Giuseppe Sinopoli's names to which notes correspond.

The chord columns appear irregular, once at a distance stretched so far that time threatens to stand still. Finally, they follow one another three times in constant acceleration, as if the music were starting to rotate. »A violent outburst of the orchestra« interrupts her circling, »an almost bursting tonal concentration that collapses under the beats of the bass drum and lets the chord column sound for the last (twelfth) time as if exhaling.« (Peter Ruzicka) »Twelve, that is the goal of the times…«.

NIGHT PIECE
Sometimes time seems to stand still, although a lot is moving, circling, being pushed aside and repeated. The experience arises in borderline situations, on the edge of (de)sleep, when the walls between the memory chambers become permeable and things flow into one another. In the NIGHT PIECE Peter Ruzicka gives sound form to such a situation. Is what you hear from the violins at the beginning - a high-pitched whistle with a lot of noise around - already a tone? The beginning of music? your denial? Paul Celan spoke of »auditory cortices«. The trumpet playing from the hall is gestural reminiscent of the beginning of Stravinsky's Sacred, in her role on Charles Ives' Unanswered Question.

What answer does she get from Ruzicka? A rapid fall and soaring motive, declamations at the lower edge of the listening spectrum, lament motives and a string melos, which just as little finds the desired wide arc as the solo trumpet from afar. Peter Ruzicka: »This music has always been there. Distant signals, calls, echoes, melodic traces that disintegrate the moment they sound, disappear. groping movement. Approaching harmonic centers. removal. extinction. Night. Then a dark counter-image breaks in. distant violence. This also falls apart. White noise. Finally, the music meets itself, seems to listen to itself, as if it has gone through a liberating experience. And she disappears, as if faded out - giving herself up."

Gustav Mahler lets the »dark counterimage« ring out from memory, the D minor chord from the song revelation, with which the trumpets announce the approaching, violent death. Mahler's signal is kept under slow motion and lowered; the trombones, the requiem instruments, play it. Through the permeable walls of the epochs, configurations from history penetrate into the present day as large shadows that break up in many ways.

»...always there«. Nothing new? But: the constellations of Ruzicka's own vocabulary with irradiations, memories, associations from history. In the process of circling, repressing, transforming and returning, he achieves what Stefan Wolpe, who had exiled from Berlin in 1933, had set out to do in 1925: »standing music«.

Habakkuk Trotter