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News« backKlas Torstensson – explosive music of the great Swede in Kraków!
Add date: Tuesday, 14 September 2010
The creator of wild and predatory music, Klas Torstensson, appeared on Monday at the Sacrum Profanum Festival, to participate in the monographic concert of his works, prepared by the group Asko | Schönberg who he is friends with. During the evening, the Swede’s famous piece Self-portrait with percussion sounded – a unique eruption of rhythms and sounds! However, before the public sunk well into Torstensson’s music, in the Museum of City Engineering, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s composition sounded. Małe Requiem dla pewnej Polki op. 66. (1993) – a piece especially for Schönberg Ensemble for the Holland Festival. This unique composition for a piano and 13 instruments - an expression of the composer’s sadness after the break-up of Czechoslovakia – the musicians played absolutely perfectly! The full of melancholy funeral sequence Dies Irae was so contrasted with the energetic Czech dance in the middle part, that it sounded nightmarishly. The public awarded this performance with a warm ovation.
Pictures: Paweł Ulatowski After the intermission, time had come for the pieces of the outstanding Swedish composer, permanently residing in Holland and closely cooperating with the group Asko |Schönberg. Acknowledged around the world, the artist still oscillates on the border of romantic fantasy and composing calculation, Mahler-style harmony and Puccini-style melody, as well as electro-acoustic and instrumental structures. In one of his pieces, he used a recording of radio waves distorted by the aurora and processed it so long in the studio, until he achieved beautiful, multi-layered sound, strongly affecting the listener. Similar impressions are caused by the piece, which we heard during Monday’s concert – Lantern Lectures, Volume IV (2002). The twenty-minute composition was divided into two sections – wind and the whole group, titled Giants Cauldron. The first enchanted with accumulated wind glissandos and their arch-precise performance by Asko |Schönberg. The second received its name after great cylindrical ice caves, in which water turns into dangerous whirls. At their image, Torstensson arranges in this composition rotating and overlapping music loops, which evoke a huge sound cauldron. However, the climax of the evening constituted a 9-part, 37-minute piece Self-portrait with percussion, composed in 2006. Klas Torstensson presents with it, using a wide percussion instrumentarium, impressive pictures of wild nature and raw sounds – breaking of tree branches, ice and rock breaking. The composition is exceptionally constructed. The symmetrical division indicating more peaceful sequences with the participation of marimba accompanied by wind instruments, and between them, great percussion madness taking place on acoustic boxes, collections of cow bells hit by drumsticks and rubbed with a bow, snares, kettledrums. It's really an explosive and unbridled in rhythmic invention concert for the percussion. In comment to the last part of the piece - the composer emphasised: “Pulse! Repeat, repeat...” As if he wanted to emphasise the strength of the rhythmic elements governing his music. The show part of the percussion in this piece was performed by Peppie Wiersm, an artist cooperating with musicians of the class of Riccardo Chailly, Philippe Herreweghe and Frans Brüggen. The unbelievably difficult piece was played by the Dutch musicians amazingly conducted by the young and superb conductor Hans Leenders – a scholarship holder of Bernard Haitink, former assistant of Walery Giegiew at Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. The artists were awarded with a long ovation, and the composer was called out with applause multiple times. Ada Ginał Other news:
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