un jardin en Bretagne
Instrumentation: Piano
Year of Composition: 05-07 2022
Dedication: for Sena Bielander and Emmanuel Coppey
First Performance: (first two movements) 20 August 2022 Sergio Scibilia - CDM San Michele, Montaldeo, Italy.
(entire suite) September 2022 Faruk Kalaycı - The Stay Warehouse, Izmir, Turkey.
Duration: 12 min. ca.
Notes: This suite for piano in three movements, while utilizing only the traditional means of playing a piano, explores the keyboard from a very close distance, focusing on harmonics of what different pedalings release, creating ghost resonances and pushing the precision of a pianist’s keyboard control to the limit. Incredibly quiet yet dramatic moments are created when the first movement ‘the blood of christ’ plays with only the most minimal attack achievable on the keyboard while a very high transformed chromatic line descends like drops of blood. At this point we start hearing the lifting of the notes more than the pitches themselves.
A major sixth resembling ‘Um Mitternacht’ from Mahler’s Rückert Lieder opens the second movement which then repeats four times and the slightest change of music carries each entry to a completely different place. At the end of this movement we ask: ‘which one was the real one?’.
The final movement brings together harmonic and motivic material from the first two movements under a memorable gesture that travels across the entire piano, sometimes following our expectation and sometimes breaking it. Like brush strokes these gestures create the image of a garden. But was it real or was it our creation?