infotext:
Peter Eötvos is setting the tone in the new music scene - not only as a composer, but also as a conductor and teacher. “Cap-ko” is a homage to Eötvös' great role model Bartók. This goes down to the last detail. Bartók's preference for parallel lines gave him the idea of using an instrument that would make it possible to play these parallel lines on the piano not with two hands, but only with one hand. Inevitably, Eötvös discovered the keyboard for himself, because it allows a second tone to sound simultaneously for every note played, whereby the interval distance can be changed as desired (such as in an organ mixture). There is also a traditionally used grand piano with a fixed right pedal, which creates an echo-like resonance for every note played, which is never muffled. Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays both instruments alternately.
Bernd Alois Zimmerman no need to introduce it. With his opera "Soldaten" and the "Requiem for a young poet" he became one of the leading composers of the post-war generation in the 1960s. The Violin Concerto is a work that highlights the characteristics of Zimmermann's composition: it expresses its inflection in a powerful and unmistakable manner.
Martin Smolka works with intervals, which he eavesdrops on “natural” sounds. His works, in which Smolka uses various forms of microtonality, are now performed at all festivals for contemporary music - the piece recorded here at the Munich "musica viva" had its world premiere at Har 2000 in Donaueschingen: "I was asked if I could go to the I wanted to write a choral piece on the subject of 'violence in our society'. But I was more touched by the violence that our society sends out – against nature, against our home planet. And I preferred to be positive in my music rather than composing some kind of protest song."
program:
Peter Eötvos
Cap-ko (2005) – dedicated to Béla Bartók
Concerto for acoustic piano, keyboard and orchestra
Playing time: 20:21
[1] I [2] II [3] III [4] IV [5] V
Pierre Laurent Aimard, Piano / Keyboards
Paul Jeukendrup, programming digital piano
Symphony Orchestra of Bayerischen Rundfunks
Peter Eötvos, conductor
Bernd Alois Zimmerman
Concerto for violin and large orchestra (1950)
Playing time: 16:47
[6] Sonata [7] Fantasy fabric [8] Rondo
Martin Mumelter, violin
Symphony Orchestra of Bayerischen Rundfunks
Peter Eötvos, conductor
Martin Smolka
Walden, the Distiller of Celestial Dews (2000)
Five pieces for mixed choir and percussion, with verse by Henry David Thoreau
Playing time: 19:38
[9] Pleiades [10] Brine [11] Indians [12] blackberries [13] Cypress
tungsten angle, percussion
Robert Blank, choirmaster
Bavarian Radio Choir
Peter Eötvos, conductor
Total: 57:00
Recorded live January 26, 2006 [1–5], [9–13] / April 7, 1989 [6–8] at the Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich.
Press:
11/2007
09.08.2007
Mother Earth and Father Haste
Eotvös Zimmermann Smolka
Neos 10705/Harmonia mundi www.neos-music.com
Now it has also arrived in music, the debate about the climate catastrophe. Hidden and half unconscious, but clear. In his five choral pieces Walden, the Distiller of Celestial Dews (2000), Martin Smolka, born in Prague in 1959, pleads for a low-emission life in nature and praises the happiness of simplicity. The title and text reveal that Henry is following David Thoreau, who attempted this on himself in the mid-19th century.
Smolka uses his musical means economically. He shortens the text to key words, and it is not uncommon for his hymns to be in unison, a melody for everyone involved. The ladies and gentlemen of the Bavarian Broadcasting Choir intoned the thoroughly romantic harmonies with radiant calm, for example when »Mother Earth and Father Haste« contrast, where a female choir wrestles with floating chords with the violently chanted male activism, which in its impatience would like to help the newly planted beans to grow by pulling on the cotyledons.
Peter Eötvös, Hungarian, born in 1944, seeks and achieves the opposite of Smolka. There is no such thing as enough for him. His piano concerto Cap-Ko (2005) demands full commitment not only from the orchestra but also from the pianist. The first impression: devastating energy balance. The piece only runs at full throttle, and often enough not even a gear is engaged: booming idle. The impression is reinforced when the pianist turns on the turbo and grabs the keyboard to send a whole battery of notes into the race with just one keystroke. It's appalling how shabby digital pianos still sound, which is particularly unpleasant when alternating with the grand piano, even if Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays both with a light hand. The spectrum of the accompanying orchestra only unfolds when you listen beyond the key dominance. Here the tonal fantasy that is missing in the piano part can suddenly be felt, as well as in the precise implementation by the Bavarian Radio Orchestra under the direction of the composer. A more resource-conserving use of funds would have highlighted these qualities more advantageously. Sometimes less is more as in ecology.
Frank Hilberg
01.07.2007
Peter Eötvös: Cap-Ko
Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Concerto for violin and large orchestra
Martin Smolka: Walden, the distiller of celestial dews
Time stands still. Mists hang over the smooth surface of the lake. Elven voices lull you to sleep from afar. Martin Smolka's music is a bit like a close-up of a blackberry bush: you can watch the dewdrops running down. Until a horde of wild gnomes break into the idyll, grumbling and stammering, swearing and unruly. “Back to nature” – that could be the motto of Martin Smolka’s fascinating choral piece “Walden, the distiller of celestial dews”. Smolka has set texts by the anarcho-philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who lived for years in a log cabin on Lake Walden and propagated the simple life. Smolka's composition is also critical of civilization right down to its substance: simple tonal melodies, gently alienated with the help of microintervals - not new music in the sense of the avant-garde, but new music, much more new than so much else that is currently being produced between Donaueschingen and Darmstadt . Living music, musica viva in the best sense.
Spacy mixture sounds
This applies in its own way to all three pieces on this CD, the 15th part of the edition musica viva, which documents concert highlights from the BR series of the same name. They are all conducted by Peter Eötvös, who also contributes his own composition – and what a composition! “Cap-Ko” is not a South Sea island, but the “Concerto for acoustic piano, keyboard and orchestra”, an unusual piano concerto in which the excellent Pierre-Laurent Aimard not only has to play a normal concert grand piano, but also a keyboard. With spacey mixed sounds and exuberant virtuosity, Eötvös creates a sparkling and contemporary homage to Béla Bartók, including a touching slow movement that traces Bartók's path into exile. The selection of works is rounded off by the early Violin Concerto by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, also a vital and spirited piece. A CD that not only underlines the importance of the "musica viva" series for contemporary music, but also shines with a high level of interpretation: the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is just as well versed in Zimmermann's neoclassicism as in the futuristic sound landscapes of Peter Eötvös, and the way the Bayerischer Rundfunk choir masters the tricky intonation in Smolka is simply brilliant.
Thorsten Preuss
05/07
