Bruno Maderna - Complete Works for Orchestra Vol.5

Bruno MADERNA (1920-1973) 

Complete Works for Orchestra Vol. 5

Concerto for violin and orchestra (1969)

Concert for piano and orchestra (1959) 

Thomas Zehetmair (violin)

Markus Bellheim (piano)

Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra

Arturo Tamayo

Orchestral Works Vol.5

Bruno Maderna composed this Concerto for Piano and Orchestra between 1958 and 1959. It was premiered in September 1959 as part of the Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where Maderna himself conducted the Hessian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The American pianist David Tudor took on the solo part – the work was also dedicated to him. Maderna's early work already contains a piano concerto, the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra from 1942. That from 1959, however, forms the core of an intensive creative period in which the Venetian composer develops central points of his musical poetics. Probably the most important relates to the dialectic between the organization of the parameters (influenced by serialism) and the concession to specific forms of indeterminability and the opening of the artwork. In the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra Maderna renounces all lyricism by exhausting the grand piano and using it as a percussion instrument - he even notates the grand piano percussion as a separate part in the score. He achieves percussive harpsichord effects both with single notes and with short, accentuated clusters of sounds. Maderna's extended approach to the instrument is in certain respects inspired by John Cage. Maderna's grand piano is also subjected to a variety of stresses: from drumming on the case to plucking the strings; from the glissandi and clusters played with hands, forearms or a drumstick to the violent slamming of the lid. With these interventions, the interpreter creates an undefined level of theatrical gestures, but the actual score is strictly organized and determined down to the last component.

The relatively short piece consists of two superordinate sections, which are each divided into three and are mirrored opposite one another. Each section consists of a main part and a solo cadenza and is framed by an introduction (in the first section) or a coda (in the second section). Structurally they are symmetrical, but the musical profile shows a clear contrast between the two sections. Thus the first is characterized by a harsh and brittle sonority, and its musical progression is tense and jagged; the piano absorbs the dense orchestral texture of idiophonic rhythm and keyboard instruments (marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, celesta, glockenspiel) – only the rigid sound columns of strings and winds are able to counteract the nervous intrusion. The second section, more intimate and elegiac in character, is introduced by a cadence of autonomous and separate fragments. Maderna defines them as "monads" and leaves the decision on their arrangement to the performer: the columns of sound made up of strings and winds - they were already present in the first section, but suffered from the interventions - now unfold in the foreground until they cover the entire soundscape dominate along with the piano. They no longer stand in contrast to the orchestra mass but are embedded in its sound horizon. After a second cadenza (this time notated in full by the composer), the piano concerto culminates in a kind of coda, in which distant echoes reverberate what was previously heard. With isolated tones, the piano comments on the in pp notated orchestral sounds and allows the increasingly wide-meshed sound fabric to slowly dissolve.

Ten years full of human and artistic experiences separate the piano concerto from the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, which premiered in September 1969 at the Festival di Musica Contemporanea in Venice (again Maderna conducted and Theo Olof played the solo violin). Many elements characterizing Maderna's mature style can be discerned in this new work. First The Violin Concerto is influenced by his compositions for magnetic tape, which are characterized by the use of pre-existing material and aleatoric techniques. When Maderna works with magnetic tape, he first records, cuts the sound material and then rearranges the fragments. In the Violin Concerto he works according to the same principle, only here he redesigns the "tape" of his own artistic biography: the sound fabric is permeated by various previously composed works, by fragments of his orchestral pieces from the second half of the XNUMXs (e.g. Amanda, Stela per Diotima and Entropia III) up to dedication, a piece for solo violin entirely intertwined with the soloist's second cadenza. The multitude of aleatoric sections can also be derived from the montage technique of electronic compositions. A constellation of independent and self-contained musical fragments structures the orchestral score: it is the conductor who is supposed to »close the form«, determine a performance order by – at his discretion – letting individual instruments play here and whole registers there. As in the first part of the piano concerto, the solo instrument stands in contrast to the orchestra mass in the violin concerto. But where the piano is almost a disruptive element in the 1959 work, here it is the orchestra that interrupts the melodic flow of the violin: throughout the concerto her voice unfolds like a long cadence, like a rhapsodic flow without any punctuation interruption. The dialectic between violin and orchestra (whose interventions are emphasized with meaningful instructions such as 'the orchestra interrupts', 'the orchestra interrupts brutally', 'irrevocable engagement of the orchestra') establishes an inner dramaturgy, the contrast between 'the artist' (the violin) and »of society« (the orchestra) – as in Hyperion. According to Maderna, the sounds are inherent to the "problem of the human being, who is looking for collectivity without being aware of the fact that without the model of individuality there can also be no collectivity".

Benedetta Zucconi - Angela Ida De Benedictis