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Notes on music by Michael Gandolfi – Witold Lutosławski – Arnold Schoenberg for Aldeburgh Festival 2012.

Programme note for Helen Grime, Virga (Hallé/Mark Elder, 17 November 2011).

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Torsten Rasch composer profile in programme book for ENO/Punchdrunk collaboration The Duchess of Malfi (world premiere production: 13–24 July 2010, Great Eastern Quay, Royal Albert Basin, London E16)

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from the Aldeburgh Festival 2010 programme book (Webern/Stravinsky/ Castiglioni/Stockhausen – Britten-Pears Composers Ensemble cond. Hugh Brunt, 18 June 2010):

After the Second World War, Webern’s music achieved a centrality which it had never known in his lifetime. Epitaphium was written in response to a request from Pierre Boulez for a short piece that might be included in a concert of works by Webern, and Stravinsky was no doubt pleased at the opportunity to align himself both with the older, departed master and with the already influential young composer-conductor. The three instruments never play together, but instead present a succession of self-contained phrases – each consisting of 12 or 24 notes, so that the piece wears its serial structure on its sleeve quite as self-consciously as does Webern’s own music. The alternation of these phrases between the high wind duo and the harp, which inhabits a contrastingly low register throughout, further suggests a set of funerary responses, and Stravinsky designated the piece as a memorial to Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg, recently deceased benefactor of the Donaueschingen Festival (which Stravinsky had visited in both the previous two years, 1957 and 1958). But perhaps the specific dedication is less important than the way the piece takes its place in a characteristic late Stravinskian world of ritualised lament. So many of the works of his last decade are private/public memorials – to Raoul Dufy, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, J.F. Kennedy – and the permutations of pitch encouraged by serial technique as Stravinsky conceived it give the music a gentle stateliness, like changes rung out over a churchyard of great men’s graves.

Of the many younger composers who in the 1950s also drew on Webern’s technical discoveries, Niccolò Castiglioni was perhaps the closest to Webern’s own emotional world. Intensely aware of the expressive potential of silence in Webern’s music, he also shared the older composer’s deep love of the mountains. Tropi (composed, like Epitaphium, in 1959) begins like a manically exaggerated version of the Webern concerto: short bursts of three or four notes passed between instruments and punctuated by silences; a small group of strings and winds sometimes joined and sometimes opposed by the piano; everything taking place in an ultra-high register of clean, clear mountain air – definition at altitude. The volatility of instrumental behaviour in this mountain climate gradually finds a counterweight in slower, more lyrical passages, until at the centre of the piece all five instruments suddenly land on a single pitch in middle register, sustained for over a minute and coloured by a variety of whisperings and rattlings as pitch gradually cedes importance to timbre (a percussionist also now joining the ensemble). The music emerges from this still centre into altered terrain. The hushed middle D gives way to a piercing high E flat. Pitch variety is restored in a passage of chords and gentle sighs. Eventually the fast tempo of the opening is recovered, but not its forceful dynamic levels or its sustained momentum, and a solo piccolo trails off into the clear air.

[also see note here on Webern, Concerto for Nine Instruments]