Till Fellner (piano), Kim Kashkashian (viola), Quatuor Diotima, Münchener Kammerorchester, Dennis Russell Davies
© 2010
WORKS
- Böse Zellen for piano and orchestra (2006/rev. 2007)
Sehr langsam – attaca – Langsam – attaca – Viertel ca. 83 – attaca – Viertel ca. 77
- Still for viola and chamber orchestra (2002)
Ruhig fließend – schneller, attacca
Ruhig fließend – schnell – ruhig fließend
- Madhares for string quartet (2006–2007)
I Madhares (Andante)
II honey from Anopolis (Adagio – attacca;)
III sleepless 1 (attacca:)
IV sleepless 2 – Madhares (Very fast)
V a song from? (Allegretto)
Awards
- Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Empfehlung
The creative output of Austrian composer (and pianist) Thomas Larcher (born 1963) whom the London Times recently called «a musical talent of unbounded sensitivity and distinction bound for 21st century glory» has been championed on ECM New Series since 2001. Last fall Larcher’s piano piece What becomes» attracted wide-spread attention when premiered on Leif Ove Andsnes’ international tour with the project «Pictures, Reframed» in which musical performances were juxtaposed with video images by concept artist Robin Rhode. In the Daily Telegraph Ivan Hewett spoke of «a real 21st-century picture of childhood, rudely energetic and unsentimental». «Madhares», the thrid release dedicated exclusively to Larcher’s works, assembles some of the finest ECM musicians such as Kim Kashkashian, Till Fellner and the Munich Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies to present a gripping cross-section of Larcher’s recent orchestral output, enhanced by the third string quartet «Madhares» which is played by the youthful French Quatuor Diotima. Larcher’s recent pieces are marked by intense sonic imagination, great rhythmic energy and a virtuoso impact that makes for an immediately rewarding listening.
Background
Thomas Larcher in Conversation with Anselm Cybinski
Anselm Cybinski: Would you say this recording marks a particular stage in your career as a composer?
Thomas Larcher: Well, in a sense every new release is a record of the latest stages you have passed through. While the first two albums I made with ECM, «Naunz» (2000) and «IXXU» (2006), presented works for smaller ensembles, in «Madhares» the focus has shifted towards music for solo instruments and orchestra. «Still», written in 2002, could be regarded as the point of departure; «Böse Zellen», written in 2006-07, marks a later stage in my pieces for larger forces – on the path towards the orchestral music I’m working on now, or that is already finished but hasn’t yet been premiered. And the quartet Madhares is my most recent foray into the world of chamber music.
The title «Böse Zellen» is taken from a movie, Still has associations with the idea of film stills, and the title of the quartet Madhares also seems to tap into the realms of optical impressions. How important are these visual connotations in your work?
I can well imagine that my music evokes a range of images in the listener’s imagination, but for me personally I find the catalyst for my work in the ideas and realms of my own mind rather than sensory impressions. This catalyst is important to me, like an impulse or an electric charge, for what it does, rather than for its particular characteristics. So the title Madhares has less to do with the geographical region in the west of Crete than with a utopian place, somewhere far away from where I am – possibly completely beyond reach.
These new pieces clearly connect with genres such as the solo concerto or the string quartet that have such a long tradition in music history. To what extent are these traditions a source of that kind of an electric charge?
For me, as a pianist, the concerto is very familiar territory, which naturally also prompts me to question it, above all by re-evaluating the primacy of the soloist. In both of the concertante works, in «Böse Zellen» and in «Still», the orchestra is very active, more than just an accompaniment, so powerful that it often swamps the soloist.
Does the composer identify with the soloist? After all, you are also a pianist . . .
Some people have described «Böse Zellen» as an «angry piece», which maybe means that it reveals a layer of my personality that is not otherwise apparent in my day to day life. But that kind of obsession, manic activity, where «the wheels in your mind just keep on constantly spinning», when you can’t stop your mind racing – I do know all of that very well. Yet, that’s not to say that the solo part should be equated with me as a person . . .
How would you describe your relationship to the instruments you have used here? – The «quiet» (silent?) viola, the prepared (masked) piano, not to mention that most noble of chamber music ensembles, the string quartet!
Yes, for me the viola does emerge from silence, but there is also a certain roughness to its sound, an unprettified side, in deliberate contrast to all that elegiac expression that is so often associated with this particular instrument. As for the piano, that’s naturally a rather complex matter. On one hand there’s the escape from the brilliant to the masked piano sound, which is also very much about extending its coloristic spectrum. That’s why it was important to me to prepare it even more than usual by using a large ball and presenting the moment of «de-preparation» as a decisive juncture in «Böse Zellen». And I’ve always been very interested in the percussive quality of the piano. On the other hand, for me the string quartet is and always has been the most exciting configuration of instruments, with the most associations, partly because it is so pure, partly because it has so unbelievably many different facets, even orchestral. The potential for sounds to merge seamlessly into each other only to become completely distinct voices again that you get in a quartet – that has to be unique. You just don’t get that kind of inwardness or that kind of tonal blend from a piano.
And could you perhaps tell us a little about working with Dennis Russell Davies?
Dennis has been both a catalyst and a great source of encouragement to me, above all between 1997 and 2002 when he was artistic director of the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna. He initiated Still, and saw it through to its premiere with Kim Kashkashian and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. «Böse Zellen» is dedicated to Dennis; he has been one of the lodestars in my life as a composer, and was extraordinarily supportive during the whole recording process, for which I am very grateful indeed.
Who are your ideal listeners, when it comes to your own music?
I have in mind a listener, who is familiar enough with the traditions of European classical music to recognise its various codes. Someone who can deal with structures and forms and yet who can enter into a sound world in a relatively naïve manner. I’m looking for a listener who in turn is looking for a dynamic relationship between the intellect and the emotions and can handle the ever-changing interaction of these two poles.
quoted from: www.ecmrecords.com
Reviews
Alex Ross: Uncanny Voices. New CDs of Chopin, Thomas Larcher, and Bach, The New Yorker, August 2010
At the beginning of Thomas Larcher’s 2007 piano concerto «Böse Zellen», or «Malignant Cells» – the first work on an ECM disk devoted to the forty-six-year-old Austrian composer – the voice of the piano is stifled. Larcher asks for the instrument to be altered in the style of John Cage, with rubber wedges inserted between the lower strings and gaffer tape applied to the upper register. The timbres that result from these operations lack the twinkling exoticism of Cage’s prepared-piano music: the piano makes a sullen, thudding sound, as if trapped behind Plexiglas. It sounds more like a machine, not less. At the beginning, the piano presents stark chords in and around E minor, and a steel ball is rolled on the strings to produce a metallic glissando, like that of a slide guitar. Over four movements, the music lurches between hectic orchestral noises and plaintive tonal harmonies, until, in a climactic passage, the wedges are removed, the tape is ripped off the strings, and the piano is allowed to sing out fully. The ending is hauntingly spare, with major and minor chords in alternation.
Larcher is an unpredictable, freethinking composer, who has set aside the modernist strictures that have long governed Central European music. He plunges into tonal spheres without irony or theoretical circumspection. In the viola concerto «Still,” which also appears on the ECM disk, the musical language occasionally verges on the otherworldly simplicity of Arvo Pärt, who is a mainstay of the label. «Madhares,» for string quartet, journeys from harsh, scratchy textures to a whispery C-major sweetness. The downside of this extreme stylistic versatility is a haphazard sense of structure. «Still» is the weakest piece on the compilation, arresting gestures in search of a narrative; «Madhares,” too, has a fitful feel. But «Böse Zellen» is riveting from start to finish – a sweat-inducing drama in instrumental form. All the works receive immaculate, strongly felt performances, from the pianist Till Fellner, the violist Kim Kashkashian, the Diotima Quartet, and the Munich Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies.
Geoff Brown: Thomas Larcher: Madhares. Some movements screech or chunter on; others linger in Schubert’s shadow or trace the shape of a song from Nepal, The Times, 07.05.2010
The music is dislocated, muffled, struggling to form itself, with traces of tonal gestures buried deep within. It’s as if the composer, after a nuclear holocaust, were trying to remember what classical music had once been. This is the sound picture first presented by Böse Zellen («Malign Cells», though best translated as «Free Radicals»), the opening work on this outstanding CD of compositions by Thomas Larcher.
He is Austrian, 46 years old and one of the few current composers whose works sound like no one else’s. Locked away in the conservative Tyrol, he knew little contemporary music at first, but grew into a notable pianist of 20th -century repertoire. From the late 1980s his composition grew in importance. So far British exposure has been sporadic, but on May 20 his cello sonata will be performed in London by Natalie Clein at LSO St Luke’s. Next year he’ll be heard at the Barbican, the Proms, and Wigmore Hall. Quite right, too: his extraordinary, arresting, communicative music is one of this century’s wonders.
The CD’s title is borrowed from a recent work for string quartet (Madhares), played with radiant commitment by the Quatuor Diotima. Some movements screech or chunter on, obsessive, motoric; others linger in Schubert’s shadow or trace the shape of a song from Nepal. It’s a work of haunting landscapes and dreams, stylistically disparate but fused by the composer’s astonishing ear and quizzical attitude to traditional forms.
Classical music’s past looms larger still in Böse Zellen, a concerto of sorts for piano and orchestra, alternately teasing and disturbing. Till Fellner has recently been heard on CD glittering in Beethoven and Bach: here the pianist clunks softly on a piano garlanded with muffled strings and a water turbine’s steel ball. Still, for viola (Kim Kashkashian) and chamber orchestra, plays its own imaginative games with music’s history. Both pieces feature the Munich Chamber Orchestra and the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, ideal for adventurous repertoire.
If you still need convincing, consider Larcher’s description of his ideal listener: someone who can recognise the structures and codes of European classical traditions, but can also «enter into a sound world in a relatively naive manner». Someone «who in turn is looking for a dynamic relationship between the intellect and the emotions”. Someone like you?
Fiona Maddocks, Thomas Larcher: Madhares, The Observer, 16.05.2010
Austrian composer Thomas Larcher (born 1963), at once experimental and responsive to tradition, isn‘t as well-known as he should be. This world premiere recording of his String Quartet No 3 (Madhares), minutely detailed in its multiplying patterns and crazily interweaving motifs, shows him at his best. Two other contrasting works (Böse Zellen, Still) feature pianist Fellner and viola player Kashkashian. All told, a bracing, exhilarating way to discover Larcher.
Andrew Clements: Larcher: Böse Zellen; Still; Madhares, The Guardian, 06.05.2010
Though he first made his name as a top-flight pianist, Thomas Larcher (born 1963) now devotes most of his time to composition, as part of an outstanding generation of Austrian composers that also includes Olga Neuwirth, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas and Johannes Maria Staud. Larcher’s music, though, is distinctly different from that of any of his near contemporaries. As these three works from the last decade show, Larcher ranges very widely in his influences, and most often well away from the mainstream of European music in the last 30 years. Böse Zellen, with its allusions to the musical past, aleatoric passages juxtaposed with tonal sequences and the persistent alienating effect of prepared-piano sounds suggests George Crumb more than say, Lachenmann, just as the romantic gestures and moments of frenzied activity of the viola work Still recall Schnittke and Kancheli rather than anyone closer to home. Madhares is different again, yet far more distinctive in its unlikely blend of styles.