What was your first impression when you delved into the original piano pieces – and what spoke to you as a composer?
It was first of all a blast from the past, to meet lyrical early-romantic piano music at close range again, after some years away from this repertoire. Both pieces are very much born of idiom and implicated in generic traditions - they are of their time, and they are engaged with pianistic skill as a formal discipline. They are also born of the sonority of the piano of the day - muted and limited, in comparison with what we are used to today, but also maybe warmer in the middle range. The pedalling and dynamics in the Urtext edition of the Notturno, for example, are quite manneristic and idiomatic, and from what I hear interpretations deal with this in wildly different ways.
I realised as a composer I was utterly in awe of the gaping question of how each of them would have played their own music. I wonder what it would be like to experience Clara Wieck-Schumann's special take on performance from memory as supporting a perception - for listeners - of improvisation. I would really like to talk to her about that, and I wish I could have heard her play! But there was also naturally the question of what they would have written if they had had the opportunity to work with orchestras in extended forms independently of their piano skills - if they had had their own symphonic language. I would have loved to experience Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel conducting an orchestra, and to parachute her into that role today, two centuries later.
Are there particular tonal or structural qualities in the works that you wanted to highlight in the orchestral version?
Despite their idiomatic rapturousness, variations and modulations, the task of orchestrating these short pieces poses many questions of scale and scope, and also questions about how time flows through these pieces. Especially in the situation of orchestrating them to be heard alongside the over-familiar works of Robert and Felix. I’ve never worked with a classical-size orchestra with a miniature time-slot before - only larger orchestras with added electronics, and longer durations - so it was a case of getting opposite ends to meet, and I mainly focused on my go-to perennial interest in asymmetry - which in relation to music of the classical-romantic period favours the latter, clashes with the former, and looks for breaks and contrasts, and opportunities to break the rules.
I also grabbed at explorations of texture as a cue to advance orchestral concepts. The Notturno does have a major reprise but otherwise is chromatically set upon a fairly relentless path of faux cadences. The combination of motivic repetition and chromatic variation is a gift in terms of being able to try out different approaches to similar material, and to set different strains of resonance loose. The Romanze has more of a sense of formal development motivating variation, contrast, harmonic progression and resolution; acompanimental figures are integrated into contrapuntal and textural thinking that lends itself well to orchestral voicing.
How did you approach the balance between remaining faithful to the original work and at the same time creating something new and orchestrally engaging?
It has to be said, I started over a few times, because it wasn’t obvious to me where the balance could lie! So, to start with a few paths I ended up not pursuing: My initial focus was on the interpretational spectrum of tempi, and I thought about stacking layers of different rubati on top of one another and letting tempo run amok, a bit like I did in my first orchestral piece, I greet you a thousand times, which I developed in 2004-05 together with visual artist Joachim Koester. There, we grappled with the material and circumstances of Brahms’ First Symphony (with a greeting to Clara Wieck-Schumann), and explored notions of flash-back, time-stretch, compression and reversed audio, as a reflection on history and time passed. (This was twenty years ago, so time-warping felt a bit fresher then than it does today.) But the artistic licence that we took with Brahms’ work in I greet you was very much based on the premise that our piece was not an arrangement, and that Brahms’ First Symphony - itself a work full of motivic repetition - had been played over and over again and has been a standard point of reference for musicians, conductors and audiences ever since it was composed.
With Felix Mendelssohn’s violin concerto and Robert Schumann’s Fourth Symphony on the programme in Aarhus, it wouldn’t have worked to mash up the two miniatures which orchestral audiences are so far unfamiliar with. I also considered composing new counterpoints to the piano pieces, adding a non-congruent layer of my own choosing (as I did by adding toy sounds to Webern’s Variations op. 27 in my piece When the wind blows). And I considered creating an entirely different time-structure around the notion of repetition that could introduce irregularity or polymetrics and in that way create a commentary on problems posed by time, tempo and interpretation.
I realised that all these approaches to Århus Symphony Orchestra’s request for orchestrations of relatively under-exposed miniatures would make for a very confusing experience which could assert themselves as off-road, interventional or heavy-handed in relation to the opportunity of simply introducing these pieces to a wider audience - the kind of audience that rocks up on a Thursday night for Felix and Robert. So it was something about finding a different role for myself and not trying invade the pieces too much with my own commentary. Brahms and Webern can cope with having their pedestal shaken a bit, but these pieces still in the process of being dusted off and lifted up. That ambivalence from my side has also come at the expense of simplifying the interpretational task for the conductor and orchestra. For example, I also considered imposing metronome markings, in the spirit of nailing down a temporal interpretation, but in light of the living tradition of interpretation of these two piano works, I decided that that, too, would be too much of an imposition from my side - so that is left in the language of the original works: ‘andante’, ’nach und nach schneller’, and so on, and not even the mention of ‘’rubato’.
How do you perceive the current interest in female composers from the 19th century – and what do you think the orchestral performance of these two works contributes in that context?
A century or two of total suppression of female musicking, and then suddenly there’s room in an orchestral programme for just a few minutes of work from the female hand, alongside the brothers and husbands who also partly stood between their creative practices and social recognition. To be honest, it’s all very confusing and a bit depressing, and the more you look into the borrowings and inspiration flows between the four composers on this programme (Robert, Clara, Felix and Fanny) the worse it gets. So putting orchestrations of these two miniatures alongside substantial, canonised orchestral works at least brings that imbalance right out into the open and brings the question to the audience of how to deal as a listener, maybe also as a consumer, with the whole notion of missing repertoire.
Of course it’s positive that audiences and orchestral programmers are curious to listen differently into the past, to discover something new about the past and pose questions about what is inherited. There’s been an underdog narrative about unknown classical works that were not canonised. There used to be a sense that there was just a few brilliant composers and all the rest were underdogs.
What do you hope the audience will take away from the concert – both in relation to the music itself and to the story of the two composers?
I hope they may feel some agency in exploring their own responses - to what extent is the familiar and the unfamiliar useful, important or necessary, in our relation to the past? What is repertoire - what’s in, what’s out? What is the value of the transfer of this music from the composers’ lived experience as pianists to the orchestral medium to which they mainly lacked access as composers?
How does this project connect to your broader work as a composer, where you often explore much more experimental formats?
It’s a fascinating disconnect. In this project, I’m not a composer - and in my creative practice, when I engage with other composers’ works, my role as orchestrator has an entirely different circumstance. It’s brought up a lot of thoughts on works not written and works not heard. Those thoughts are not necessarily creatively nourishing. The close contact with these composers’ short pieces up against dominant forces of compositional and orchestral tradition to some extent underlines the two composers' limited opportunities, and to some extent frames their musical expression in the context of negotiating social expectations. It seems the development of that social context in the intervening centuries has been at best incremental.
So it has been a difficult, and perhaps, sad project in that sense. Normally, I think it’s my job as a music creator to come with something off-road, un-called-for, and at best entirely inappropriate. But within that is also the call to create something that hopefully leaves listeners, performers and myself in a different place from where we started. I hope that with these orchestrations I help the two composers to achieve the latter, and that their works, with my orchestration, will contribute to that experience of coming to a different place.
Concert info
Thursday 30 October, 19:30
Symfonisk Sal, Musikhuset Aarhus
Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Samuel Lee, Alexander Sitkovetsky
More info and tickets
Programme
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel: Notturno, orch. Juliana Hodkinson
Felix Mendelssohn: Violinkoncert
Clara W. Schumann: Romanze nr. 2 (op. 11), orch. Juliana Hodkinson
Robert Schumann: Symfoni nr. 4