What Becomes/Was wird for piano (2009)

Andsnes certainly caught the manic virtuosity of Larcher’s piece, which was a real 21st-century picture of childhood, rudely energetic and unsentimental. At this point, the imagery sprang briefly to life on the screen above and behind Andsnes. We saw wheeling shapes advancing and retreating, two small children launching a roughly animated plane like a black-and-white drawing, and a wobbly bike ride seen forwards and in reverse.
These worked well, because music and image had nothing to lose by the transaction. They were pure “play”, so they fitted like hand and glove.

Ivan Hewett: Pictures Reframed, Review, The Telegraph, December 7, 2009

“Pictures at an Exhibition” conveys Mussorgsky’s impressions on attending a memorial exhibition of paintings by the Russian artist Victor Hartmann. Ten of the suite’s sections were inspired by specific Hartmann paintings. The parts called “Promenade” suggest the viewer strolling from one to another. In a program note Mr. Andsnes wrote that this music has always “made me think of the gallery visitor as an innocent, rather naïve soul (perhaps even a child).”
So childhood was the theme of the “Pictures Reframed” program, which included three other works: the two existing pieces from Mussorgsky’s incomplete 1865 suite “Memories of Childhood”, Schumann’s “Kinderscenen” [and] “What becomes,” a new work by the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher in its premiere performance. [The piece,] though often turbulent and volatile, also fitted the overall theme and was accompanied by video. This 20-minute, six-movement piece ranged over diverse styles, with stretches of postmodern harmonies that recalled the bucolic Copland and fantastical episodes that included pitches, thuds and scratches produced from altered strings on the piano. Mr. Andsnes dispatched the piece, which climaxes in a hell-bent, frenetic scherzo, with brilliant pianism and cool authority.

Anthony Tommasini: Sound and Vision: A Piano Recital With a Multimedia Heart, The New York Times, November 16, 2009

“Pictures Reframed,” a dialogue between Rhode’s images and Andsnes’s performances of music by Mussorgsky, Schumann and the Austrian pianist-composer Thomas Larcher, is a welcome attempt to tinker with the conventional concert format, presenting a nearly seamless hour and a half of unbroken music and image.
[…]
Larcher’s piece was an inventive exploration of the not-too-prepared piano. Actually preparing a piano, by placing various objects under and through its strings, was not possible due to the lack of intermission, so Andsnes simply laid a couple of objects on the strings, creating flattened, muted or twangy sounds that the composer probed, first gingerly, but building up to a wild and fast scherzo.

Anne Midgette: Andses and Rhode’s “Pictures&rdquo, Washington Post, November 23, 2009

Andsnes explained in one of the program notes that Mussorgsky’s narrative in “Pictures at an Exhibition” has always made him think of the gallery visitor as an innocent, rather naive soul (perhaps even a child) marching in to see the exhibition, in complete ignorance of what he will encounter. Robin Rhode’s children animations were some of the first pieces of his art Andsnes saw, and the inventive playfulness impressed him. When they worked on Pictures Reframed it struck him that the entire program of the evening could have a childlike spirit. He wanted to include Schumann’s “Kinderszenen”, Mussorgsky’s “From Memories of Childhood” (only two movements exist), and Thomas Larcher’s new piano cycle What becomes, a piece being partly composed in collaboration with Robin, who created two new “children-animations” to be shown together with the second and last movement of the piece.
[…]
Andsnes gave Larcher?s “What becomes” its premiere performance in New York on November 13, and it was well received in Lincoln Center?s fully packed Alice Tully Hall. Well, it is a rather tumultuous and virulent piece of about twenty minutes filled with postmodern phrases and harmonies, ranging from Schubert to Copland and from the Renaissance to Cage. Yes, Cage, because the pianist is expected to shorten the strings by hand, to change pitch and to add some scratching sounds here and there. The brilliant piece needs a frenetic performance to take off, but who could expect anything else under the hands of the virtuoso Andsnes?

www.musicweb-international.com, December 2009

More techie games came with a new work by Austrian composer Thomas Larcher, What Becomes, for which Andsnes stuck wedges and various other devices into the strings of the piano by torchlight – sabotage in the dark, a pleasingly childlike thing to do. The result was not nearly as eccentric as might have been hoped, but rather tonal and easy-listening – again, children would love the dud thuds of the hobbled notes or the places where Andsnes strummed the piano strings with ghostly fingers.
The little sections (rather like studies, homing in on simple ideas of texture or rhythm) have picturesque names, “Parabolic Bikes”, or “Paper Planes”, to which Rhode responds with a stop-motion sequence of a child apparently riding her bike along a white line of bricks, until you eventually see the child and bike are flat on the road, it’s the line that’s being moved in perfect timing with the musical pulse – a faintly worrying joke. In “Paper Planes” two children are staring up a white wall on which graffiti aeroplanes are animated into great flocks of flying rhombuses. It’s as if the children are drawing skies-ful of planes in their heads. Finally each ends up with a pencilled plane diving into their hand

aus: Ismene Brown: Pictures Reframed: Leif Ove Andsnes & Robin Rhode, The New York Times, December 5, 2009