Danish
piano trios after 1945
Herman D.
Koppel's career
(1908-1998) began with the study of the piano at the Royal Danish Academy of
Music in Copenhagen, with further studies in Berlin, Paris and London. From his
debut in 1930 and throughout his life Koppel was a prominent figure among
Danish pianists. His Piano Trio, op. 88 from 1971 has many of Koppel's
distinctive compositional characteristics. The role of the piano is defined as
the virtuoso driving force of the ensemble, with its ‘mechanistic' Neoclassical
tonality and clear-cut irregular rhythms, thus forming the musical foundation
for Koppel the pianist. Over this lies the melody of the string parts, often in
unison, sounding, in contrast to the piano's Prokofiev-like figures, like
Bartókian folk melodies of the fully singable kind.
Each of the four movements works
with such a melody as a kind of theme, but in very different ways. While the
first and second movements display the thematic material con
leggerezza, with
lightness, and in fragments, the third movement consists of seven fundamentally
different variations on the theme. In duration they range from ten seconds to
one and a half minutes, in character from expressive folklore to diabolical
grotesques. The last movement reveals yet another aspect of the material in a
tour de force where the piano fills in all the possible quavers that the good
three minutes of the piece can hold.
Karl Aage
Rasmussen's (born
1947) Trauergondol draws its inspiration from Franz
Liszt's piano piece of the same name, La lugubre gondola, written after a visit to his
daughter and her husband Richard Wagner in Venice in 1882. The story behind the
work is that in a nightmare Liszt saw the ailing Wagner's funeral procession
sailing through the canals of Venice, and wrote the piece to exorcise the
vision.
Rasmussen remains loyal in his
recomposition of Liszt's work. Both have the low register acting as the
musically-painted gondola in rocking movements from gently splashing waves to
dramatic storms. The high register - in Liszt the right hand on the piano, in
Rasmussen the strings - sings melancholy melodies. But Rasmussen's work is not
like Liszt's. His own music sounds throughout the work in the form of the tempo
variations and note displacements that make the work seem like one long line
running from the low to the high and back to the low, before the concluding
melancholy coda. In that sense the work is all his own, inasmuch as the tempo
work - eternally accelerating (of course an auditory deceit!) - is a thoroughly
Rasmussenesque invention.
As a
pianist, author and composer with more than 650 works to his credit Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000) had a quite crucial
influence on Danish musical life. His works are as a rule recognizable to
anyone who has heard just a couple of pieces from Bentzon's hand -
para-doxically enough, since he has worked with the whole palette of the art of
music: in the 1930s inspired by Carl Nielsen, Bartók and Neoclassicism; in the
1940s by German Expressionism; in the 1950s by Vagn Holmboe, metamorphosis and
dodecaphony; and in the 1960s by the Fluxus movement etc. Nevertheless there is
something highly personal that recurs throughout and binds all Bentzon's
compositional phases together. Something distinctly Bentzonesque in the tone.
Trio quattro is gentle music, romantic in a
sense, but still with the Bentzonesque mechanical repetitions - a residue of
the Neoclassical. The second movement is if possible oriented even more towards
remote romantic regions than the first, but in the same slightly floating,
melancholy tone. And once more, as a contrast to the foregoing, Bentzon's
humour does not fail him in the quick, very short final movement. Over the
predominant triplet motif Bentzon has notated a rhythmically corresponding
"Oh-Ka-tha-ri-na", presumably as a more straightforward, personally longing
comment on the music he has produced.
Trio II from 1976 is a good example of
the methods and styles that Poul Rovsing Olsen (1922-1982) -
ethno-musicologist, lawyer, critic and organizer in the musical world -
absorbed into his music over the years. Three elements are crucial: sonority,
where notes are emphasized for their sound, not their harmonic context;
systematic structure, where sections succeed one another like beads on a string
in a kind of -mechanical metamorphosis; and foreignness - usually rhythmic -
where the pulse is regular with a few displacements which can be traced to what
is at all events a non-western inspiration.
As can be heard immediately in
the first movement, Rovsing Olsen practices a tonal minimalism, but at the same
time a maximalism of sonority. The music takes its course systematically in
self-contained sections, where rhythmic patterns and figures range in sonority
from delicate string harmonics to the marked rhythmic motifs - actually
ostinati - where the parts comment on one another in a wealth of sound-effects
such as echoes, contrasts and colourings. The second movement offers a
folk-music-like string passage with appropriate pathos, developing almost
mechanically into expressive atonality. The activity is still minimal, the
music transparent and ‘thin-sounding', and all the entrances equally central
and completely audible as delicate gesticulations. In the concluding movement
we get power: a piano ostinato in the bass drives the music forward, and takes
us through various stages until a frenetico section takes over with an increasing confusion of
the mechanics of the three parts, before the work ends - delicately once more -
with an expressive string coda.
Bent
Lorentzen (born 1935)
is probably best known as a composer of music drama. Nevertheless, we have a
succession of very important electronic and instrumental works from his pen.
Among biographical events crucial to his compositional training one must
mention, after due training at the Royal Academy of Music in Århus, his
participation in the holiday courses in Darmstadt in the mid-sixties and his
later period at the EMS electronic music studio in Stockholm. This must be why
the electronic approach has become central for Lorentzen - for in his acoustic
music too it is the sonorities of the instruments that are explored as if they
were in a mixer console.
At the
overall level Contours is just
what the title suggests: that is, contours of music in a kind of timbral
variation work that dwells in detail on the special colours of the instruments
- in the sense that for Lorentzen the timbre must be what lies ‘at the edge' of
the sound of the instruments.
A fragile introduction leads into a long, trans-parent melodic
concatenation, first for the piano, then for the strings. The music is without
pulse, the bar lines have gone, and only the individual note relates to its
successor in an overall rhythmic indefinability much in the same way as in the
work of Olivier Messiaen. The second passage, on the other hand, is rhythmic,
with real bars, yet in a tempo that turns the previously lingering into
something gushingly, escalatingly hectic. The third passage again dwells on a
variation, the fourth is hectic again, but this time moving towards a demented
ending in rhythmically marked, virtuoso runs all over the instruments.
Henrik Friis, 2004