Cerha: Skizzen, für Orchester

The winter of 2011/2012 was an
enormously productive time for me. I was often asked for organ pieces; I had
never written one – but suddenly, in late November, organ sounds began to take
shape within me and within a short time – without a commission or other impulse
– I composed a number of preludes and inventions for organ. After they were
composed, they followed me like an ineluctable obsession, swelling out of their
formal seams, proliferating – and 11 sketches for orchestra grew out of notions
from the organ pieces in December. The pieces are short, immediate and – I hope
– without bombast or artifice; often sparingly set, they are limpid and easily
grasped by listeners.

Regarding the characterisation:
the first piece is slow and somewhat lugubrious in its energy. The second is
turbulent, translating at its end to the regular crotchets (quarter notes) of
the next piece, which is based on a stepwise descending fourth and its
inversion. The descending fourth is a formula used countless times from the
Renaissance to the late Baroque as the ground [i.e. the bass] for multitudinous
variations. In this case it has an elegiac character with, perhaps, a touch of
Klezmer. The final piece is dramatic, hotly excited.

The Skizzen [“Sketches”]
reflect what I wanted from music at the time I wrote them. But since – thank
God – people do not always remain the same, these sketches
yet again mark what is for me today a “historical” position.

Friedrich Cerha

Translation Copyright © 2012 by Grant Chorley