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THE HORIZON OF POSSIBILITY CLOUDS 2 Peter Ruzicka composed CLOUDS commissioned by Hessischer Rundfunk for the Rheingau Festival 2012. After the premiere, he revised the score and created an expanded version as CLOUDS 2. With the newly composed second movement, the string quartet, which moves into the sound architecture of the work on a second level compared to the orchestra, is given a much more significant role. For a short time he considered naming the piece Der ferne Klang, but this title was occupied once and for all by Franz Schreker's opera. He was guided by the idea that his music was searching for a sound that he had never heard before and that had never appeared in any of his works. The piece occurs as an approach with heckling, with sound figures that have a similar dramatic function in his stage works. They act like clouds that hide and envelop the sought-after sound, letting its contours shine through, blur or disappear. The piece breaks out of the silence, quietly, at the upper edges of the listening area. The string quartet begins with static, flat sounds in the highest register. The orchestral strings throw in a glassy, bell-like sound that increases dynamically from time to time. The quartet maintains its independence from the large group, temporarily even moving in independent time sequences, so that »at times the impression of a 'commentary' on a second level can arise« (Peter Ruzicka). – The first sentence of CLOUDS ends in silence, again at the edges of hearing, but now in depth, in tones that, in their overtone spectrum, allow the sound that was heard before to have an effect. It is that "distant sound" that is never fully revealed. – In the middle, the strings had started a terrifyingly fast figure and an aggressive outburst from the orchestra, in whose “breathing pauses” the enigmatic structure shimmers through. But what is this "distant sound"? "Sound" can mean different things: a single chord, but also the atmosphere of a whole work. Like Ruzicka him in CLOUDS understands is revealed most clearly just before the apocalyptic orchestral outburst in the middle of the first movement. In the winds, one hears a succession of chords with frayed edges, underpinned by the drums. They flow into each other as if they came from far away. These are tonal elements that have been detached from their traditional logic and replace the grammatical order with a fluid visual order. Historically they sound from the time when the traditional system of "correct" chord progressions lost its binding power and the sounds - according to Schönberg - developed an "instinct" that composing had to track down. This time was around a hundred years ago, and her »addiction to sound« was the subject of two literary and musical works: in Franz Schreker's opera The distant sound, which premiered in 1912, and in Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, the central chapter of which, the pact with the devil by the composer Adrian Leverkühn, dates the poet to 1911 or 1912. The protagonist in Schreker's opera, also a composer, can only unravel the unheard of things he had been striving for all his life until the end of his life. Ruzicka refers to the artist's opera by not fully decoding its "distant sound". At its clearest point, it is made up of four components: a D minor triad, the layering of whole tones and their luminous colors, a chord that traditionally carried the final effect of a piece as the penultimate one, but in itself an inconstant one exudes beauty, and the traditional but long-established "fright chord." Depending on the staggering of the foreground and background, their interplay can have very different emotional effects. The "distant sound" is a complex structure, as the first station on the way to it Ruzicka puts the interval, which went down in music history as "diabolus in musica", as the devil in music, and about which the main character in Thomas Mann's Roman had many thoughts. “…POSSIBLE-À-CHAQUE-INSTANT” Paul Valéry thought: "Perhaps it would be interesting to create a work that would show at each of its nodes how different things can be presented to the mind before it chooses a single sequence from them, which then becomes available in the text. That would mean: instead of the illusion of a single determination imitating the real, that of the 'at-every-moment-possible' ‹ (possible-à-chaque-instant) put.« Peter Ruzicka put it on his 7nd string quartet perish; He wrote: »For me, such a reflective observation sets Beethoven's string quartet op. 131 free, a singular work that constantly points to a ›horizon of possibilities‹. In my 7th string quartet I avoid clear continuities and often speak in the form of possibilities about 'fragments from the future'.« He had »a compositional self-experience« in mind, »which does not aim at the totality of the composition, but rather reflects its processual course.« But what is that, the potential form of music? Above the first bar of his score, Ruzicka wrote: »Absolute outer and inner silence. ›Dal niente‹, as if this music was always there...« – Ruzicka has used this symbol for spiritual concentration since his early works. At the limit of hearing, fleeting, shadowy figures emerge, coiled around a note, with a small escape into the depths, fragments of a music that "is there" but cannot be heard coherently. Where do they come from, where are they leading to? Do you hear objections to something hidden or fragmented passages that don't yet reveal their state of excitement? The first phase of the quartet can be perceived as reflections on which imaginable paths are laid out in the constellation of individual events, including in the zones of silence. There is no clear »solution« for the interplay of the moments, which repeat themselves in slightly different ways, condense their constellation, turn into directed or stationary movement, mostly remain quiet, but also have hard attacks in between. Until a falling figure drives into the sensitive event with great force, once, twice, then three times in a row. With it, two further aspects of musical possibilities gain validity: on the one hand, the break, the sudden appearance of something different, stranger, unforeseen (although not entirely unannounced). Beethoven has a lasting effect: the violent contrast between continuity and discontinuity characterizes his C sharp minor quartet, among other things. On the other hand, the external relations of a work are addressed. Because the striking figure comes from an earlier work by Ruzicka, the 5. String Quartet STURZ; it appears here intensified. A musical idea lives on, even if it has already been captured in a work, developing and transforming and thus establishing a story of its own; this is contained in every occurrence as a possibility. The same applies to all passages of the more than half-hour work, which Ruzicka characterizes with the word "lontano" (distant), among other things, quiet, vocal sections of peculiar beauty, counteracting forces to the excited movements and harsh sounds from which they are partly thrown out, Counterforces also to the buzzing passages with their raging outbursts, which escalate into almost percussive chord repetitions. The quiet reflections open a horizon of possibilities, precisely because they awaken memories, more or less specific. In the end, this horizon widens, the reality of the sound approaches the silence - with delicate tones and figures that do not only come from string instruments. Habakkuk Trotter program: [01] CLOUDS 2 for String Quartet and Orchestra (2013) 19:22 [02-09] “…POSSIBLE-À-CHAQUE-INSTANT” String Quartet No. 7 (2016) 41:57 Total playing time 61:28 Minguet Quartet German Symphony Orchestra Berlin World Premiere Recordings Press:
21 January 2019, Paco Yanez wrote: En nuestras últimas Resñas Dedicadas a la Música de Peter Ruzicka (Düsseldorf, 1948) en el Sello Neos, Ya Habíamos Comentado Qa La Discográfica de Múnich Se Ha convertido en la gran referencia para acercarnos En Prolífico Catálogo Alemán, Cuya series en NEOS is on the way to the canon interpretative ruzickiano, also the buena muestra tanto sus registros orquestales como los camerísticos: el grueso de las graveaciones de Peter Ruzicka en NEOS, y géneros que confluyen en el compacto que hoy reseñamos, en el que podemos escuchar su séptimo cuarteto de cuerda “…POSSIBLE-À-CHAQUE-INSTANT” (2016) and the partitura para cuarteto de cuerda y orquesta CLOUDS 2 (2013). Precisemente, con CLOUDS 2 comenzamos hoy nuestra inmersión en Peter Ruzicka, un Ruzicka aquí más cercano que nunca a Toshio Hosokawa ya desde el pizzicato que abre la partitura y sus subsiguientes acordes, cuyos agudos registros recuerdan el sonido de un shō. (...)
01/2019 (p. 55) Composer, conductor and administrator, Peter Ruzicka is certainly among the most versatile of present-day musicians and this latest release updates the story with regard to his music for string quartet (the initial six quartets and sundry pieces having already appeared on a to-disc set - NEOS 10822-23). Extended from an earlier work, clouds 2 (2013) takes is cue from “Der ferne Klang” – not in terms of Schreker's opera but of that “distant Sound”, who's imaging runs through German late Romanticism and early modernism. Quartet and orchestra interact not as a concerto grosso but rather a process of growing confrontation prior to the transfigured yet unresolved close. (…) Superb playing of the Minguet Quartet and, in the earlier work, the Deutsches SO. (...) Richard Whitehouse
January 2019 The Fono Forum reviewers present their favorites under the heading “Our CDs of the Year”. Dirk Wieschollek writes about NEOS 11808: “Exciting mixtures of chamber music and orchestral textures as well as a non plus ultra string quartet.”
November 2018 Two current string quartet compositions by Peter Ruzicka claim the intangibility and changeability of musical gestures: processes and searches instead of fixed contours and shapes, which nevertheless repeatedly leads to states of extreme expressivity. (...) The Minguet Quartet makes this a non-plus-ultra of string quartets in a captivating manner. Dirk Wieschollek
On September 15.9.2018th, XNUMX Guido Fischer wrote: Peter Ruzicka is a multitasker like in a book. (...) And although he has long been writing his pieces with a mastery of craftsmanship, like Wolfgang Rihm, for example, empty phrases (as is often the case with Rihm) are not his thing. Basically, Ruzicka could not choose a better ensemble than the Minguet Quartet for his two works for string quartet that have just been recorded. Not only because the musicians are intimately familiar with his tonal language. The challenges that await the musicians in the 2016th string quartet, composed in 7, are accepted with astonishing sovereignty. (...) The "possible at any moment" (that's the translation of Paul Valéry's title "... possible-à-chaque-instant" of the 7th string quartet) is also reflected in the abrupt turns, which are of enormous sharpness to mysterious poetry, from violent sound compressions to groping for silence. Music that forces you to listen and listen. Before that, the Minguet Quartet, together with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducted by the composer, also presents “Clouds 2” from 2013 as a world premiere recording stele-like structures develop in the course of the piece and move almost like ghosts. And the same applies here: impressive. |
