Date of recording: 17.05.2017
Venue of recording: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna
Soloist: Alfred Melichar, accordion (alfredmelichar.com)
The work was commissioned by the Ensemble Wiener Collage and is dedicated to this outstanding ensemble in a spirit of friendship. I wanted to include the accordion, which has now established itself in the newest and most diverse areas of musical expression and has even become a cult instrument, in my compositional considerations and to present its fascinatingly individual sound world accordingly. This task suited me very well, as I have always felt drawn to forms of concertante content since the beginning of my compositional activity, in order to face the particular challenge of a musical partnership, to be confronted with an overabundance of creative possibilities, to extract perspectives for my own actions and to express them in individual forms. The term "solo concerto" has evidently been somewhat discredited since 1945, and it seems to be moving away from its original content again and again, choosing solo instruments as the primary carriers of musical events, placing them at the center, assigning them tasks that can only be solved in this or that way by this or that instrument. Transitional phases and the questioning of established norms have always aroused my particular curiosity, and it is less strange than initially assumed that concert pieces in which there is no longer any talk of "concertare", of soloists competing for the virtuoso's palm, can also exude a fascination that emanates from the instrumentalist and his playing, and not least from his instrument. This directs the inquiring eye anew to the instrumental and its perhaps still hidden secrets. The composition consists of four movements, which are only separated from each other by short general pauses. Apart from a cadenza dedicated to the soloist, the events are characterized by rich musical forms, by a variety of dialogues, of instruments and groups among themselves, as well as of the instruments with the soloist. The dualism - here solo instrument, here ensemble - has thus been abolished; the musicians have to a certain extent been transferred from the role of opponents to that of equal partners. It is a multifaceted network of instrumental relationships, from individual actions to the bundling of complex contrapuntal and harmonic layers of experience, a pluralistic sound, alternating in density and continuity, a flexible fabric of transparent delicacy as well as block-like solidity. My aim was to arrive at formations, at figures that are ultimately and solely defined by their musical reality, to transcend the explainable, the sayable, the somehow identifiable, where the organized, even tonal, impulsively rhythmic or dance-like leads over into the living unity of the musical organism, into its contradictorily uniform growth.