for orchestra (2000)
Orchestra:
3(3rd=picc) 3(3rd=hb) 3(3rd=bcl) 3(3rd=cfg) - 4 3 3 1 - timp, perc(3), str
Duration: 15 mins
Premiere May 24th, 2001, Funkhaus Halberg, Saarbrücken
RSO Saarbrücken, cond.: Andrea Pestalozza
About the work:
Sérenade pour l'Orphée - the title arouses expectations of a possibly romantic kind, for example after a tone poem in Liszt's tradition. It may turn out that the title is just as loosely associated with the piece as the two parts of the title are with each other. So why a serenade for an ancient god of singers?
The initial idea for the sound of the piece first came to me when I was composing the music for an Orpheus material: sustained tones of muted trumpets, which only change slowly, plus xylophone tremolo. The paralysis in terror and sadness over the double loss of Eurydice...
In the orchestral piece, this rigidity finally dissolves into various other sound shapes that result from sticking to a sound idea and from additions and subtractions from it. It is not based on a constructive system, but rather on the logic of association, the consistency of the unconnected, which proves to be the current on which events are floating, by which they are driven. What is initially timidly pushed forward, later erupts in several outbursts, to then make way for familiar figures – already heard at the beginning of the piece – into which, however, xylophone and woodblocks intersperse natural, “throbbing” sounds. Perhaps another possible association with Orpheus: the singer whose singing the trees and bushes listen to, who is mourned by the rocks and rivers, and who returns to nature after his death – he becomes nature.
The painter Francis Bacon said: "Of course, one constantly tries to preserve the vitality of chance and still maintain continuity." My working attitude is perhaps comparable: the unprepared composing "directly with the sound" leads to an unpredictability of the musical events in detail, which accounts for the tension of the structure. However, since such settings are always subject to a – possibly unconscious – sense of form, an overall form – of whatever kind – results.
Anno Schreier, 2001