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THE PIANO WORKS BY WOLFGANG RIHM My first contact with the piano music of Wolfgang Rihm came relatively late. About eight years ago I heard the piano piece 5 ›Tombeau‹ in a concert. I was spontaneously enraptured by the dark force of this music. Like an outcry, a dark rebellion, followed by three exclamation marks ... The strong architectural conception of the work with the two frame parts, which - each in its own way - try to hold the sky-storming middle part like two poles of calm, communicated to me rather unconsciously at the time. Most immediate, however, was the effect of the contrast of the first C held 'until decay' and the eruptions that followed. The concluding C octaves were also impressive, a defiant insistence on holding your breath after minutes of unbridled frenetic obsession that brought the pianist to the brink of exhaustion. Without attempting to catalog Rihm's oeuvre, I would like to take a closer look at some aspects that particularly fascinate me about Rihm. The first aspect is a very obvious one: the tremendous kinetic energy that is released when playing this music. It arises from the gesture, it is completely absorbed in the gesture. Perhaps even more extreme than in Piano Piece 5, Piano Piece 7 is the stage for gestures charged to the point of irritation. Here a single short figure is subjected to its own magnetic force as if in a whirlpool. The accents shift, the beat dissolves until a shore is to be sung in insane chains of trills. It comes into view - and disappears again. Shortly before the end, the music triumphs in E flat major. A hard-fought triumph! The E flat major is like a scream against the waves of madness suffered. Finally, a shadowy world emerges, ›come una aria‹, taciturn and ecstatically rigid, before the music resumes its earlier gesture and plunges into the orcus. This second reality, the world of shadows and stillness, is far less obvious in Rihm's work, but is nevertheless the counter-image to the offensive energetics of his music, which gives it spatial depth. Already in the piano piece 7 the music takes place on two dynamic levels, which are given by the short semiquavers in triple sforzato and the immediately following dotted quaver in triple piano. In the follow-up study, indirect sound effects are used even more impressively, most clearly through the echoes of muted notes held in the middle pedal, but also through rhetorical pauses and a pause in the singing. The passages in which nothing actually happens become the decisive moment of expression here. What fascinates me about Piano Piece 4 is its poetry, in the romantic sense. Although the work formally still adheres to the structuralism of the early piano pieces, a melody is celebrated here that is reminiscent of Chopin in places. For me, this piece was one of the great discoveries of recent years! The situation is similar with Zwei kleine Schwingungen, two short pieces written much later, titled slow and calmo. In both miniatures, the greatest lyrical density is achieved in the smallest of spaces. A dream music that is free of any heaviness and remains committed only to poetry. Techniques of association and citation are essential, recurring means of aesthetic reflection for Rihm. Wilhelm Killmayer has impressively shown how in the piano piece 6 ›Bagatelles‹, similar to certain poems by Hölderlin, a revolving around certain sound images/sound images is made the basis of new developments. The subtitle Bagatelles is so apt because it is reminiscent of Beethoven, who adopted exactly this procedure in his late Bagatelles. In the middle of this piece the beginning of the last piano piece from Opus 118 by Brahms is quoted. The Brahmsliebe waltz pays tribute to this composer not only in the title. He traces – “not fast, rather heavy, often dull, never cheerful, maybe grumpy, sour, but serious” – the faded memory of the great romantic with every fiber of his being, without ever being able to fully succeed. The Ländler is fully committed to the spirit of Schubert, it dies as it began - unredeemed. Many of Rihm's later pieces are dedications: another sheet is dedicated to Pierre Boulez on his 75th birthday; in dialogue, posthumous monuments are erected to five close friends whom the composer lost in the year of its composition; Wordless was created for Peter Sloterdijk's 60th birthday. This last work is written as a ›song without words‹ with a separate staff for a vocal part, which, however, never begins. Rihm wrote to me: »Two musical moments, between Vienna and Paris – 1820 and 1905 – as if playing behind glass.« The two early piano pieces 1 and 2, both of which still have opus numbers in a very old-fashioned way, were written at a time when structure and order were paramount. I love both works very much because both can hardly hide their capricious, liberal nature, which resists any doctrine. This collection, which covers a total of 38 years of Wolfgang Rihm's work, begins with the first two piano pieces and shows the most diverse facets of Rihm's cosmos in almost two and a half hours. Not included are smaller compositions before 1970 and 2 Linien, a ›work in progress‹ which, as Rihm writes, is intended to be »unfinished – unfinished«. Markus Bellheim |
program:
CD 1 [01] 13:07 p.m Piano Piece No. 1 Op. 8a (1970) 14:35 Piano Piece No. 2 Op. 8b (1971) 14:32 Piano Piece No. 4 (1974) 09:58 Piano Piece No. 5 ›Tombeau‹ (1975) [17] 14:33 p.m Piano Piece No. 6 ›Bagatelles‹ . [18] 08:23 p.m Ländler (1979) Total time: 75:59
CD 2 [01] 09:20 p.m Piano Piece No. 7 (1980) 16:46 communion (1999) 16:46 [09] 02:53 p.m On another sheet (2000) 03:50 Two small vibrations . 05:24 wordless (2007) Total time: 68:37 Markus Bellheim, Piano |
Press:
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Wolfgang Rihm: Piano Pieces
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