Wolfgang Rihm
Versuchung
Short instrumentation: 1 2 1 2 - 1 1 1 1 - perc(2), hp, pno, vln(2), vla(3), vc(3), cb(2)
Duration: 25'
Solos:
violoncello
Instrumentation details:
flute
oboe
cor anglais
clarinet in A (+bass cl(Bb))
bassoon
contrabassoon
horn in F
trumpet in C
trombone
tuba
1st percussion
2nd percussion
harp
piano
1st violin
2nd violin
1st viola
2nd viola
3rd viola
1st violoncello
2nd violoncello
3rd violoncello
1st contrabass
2nd contrabass
Rihm - Versuchung for violoncello and orchestra
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Wolfgang Rihm
Rihm: VersuchungOrchestration: for violoncello and orchestra
Type: Studienpartitur
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Audio preview
Work introduction
When he was a child, Wolfgang Rihm first wanted to be a painter, then
a writer and then, finally, a composer. Accordingly, his path from the visual
art to somewhat objectified, physically gestural composing was shorter than one
might have assumed. Entire groups of his works exemplify his close ties to
visual art and the many artists among his friends are testimony to the flux of
energy coursing between his music and painting. His composing is a sculptural
working on the endless sound he perceives within himself. Says Rihm: “I have
the notion of a great block of music inside me. Every composition is at once a
part of that and a physiognomy chiselled from it [ … ] With me, it is similar
to my block of music – a temporal thread separates a measured part; only then
does it create my physiognomy.”
The subjects in Rihm’s
compositions recount hazard and compulsive behaviour; those traits also typify
his music-writing itself. In his musical ideology, imagining music, presenting
a new excerpt, a new form from the endlessly flowing musical flux with every
work is comparable to obsession. The sound is jeopardised in his volatile
presence, just as his body’s envelope is subject to spatial distortion; in
“cutting into my own flesh” (Rihm) he can see, enter and perceive inner spaces
and conditions far from every conventional concept of beauty – describable,
perhaps, as varying degrees of brittleness.
Brittleness of line and jeopardy
of perspective are concerns in Rihm’s homage to Max Beckmann’s Versuchung
[“temptation”] for cello and orchestra, in which he draws from Beckmann’s
triptych The Temptation (of St. Anthony),
painted in the 1930s. (At the same time, he produced another “Beckmann”
composition, Der Maler Träumt [“The
Painter Dreaming”] for baritone and orchestra, based on Beckmann’s text Über meine Malerei [“About my
Painting”]).
Rihm actually does manage to
formulate precisely the prismatic “brush-up” of the individual lines in the Klangfarbe in the relationship between
the solo instrument and the orchestra; the polish loses its foundations in the
frenzy, only to survive the tonal free-fall into the abysses of the brooding
instruments, as that very temptation/jeopardy of Anthony exemplifies.
In a certain sense, the
orchestra constitutes the colour and gestural spectrum which, like a rebound of the solo voice, leads to the onset of inspiration, i.e.
concentrating the music’s ray through the composition’s prism back to the
initial impulse. Chronology and recollection rendezvous to mourn the loss of
complete innocence – and to withstand the hazard/temptation.
Achim Heidenreich
From the Maerzmusik programme
booklet, 2012
Translation Copyright © 2012 by Grant Chorley