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«Concerto per Klee» for Violoncello and Chamber Orchestra (2007)

Homage to Paul Klee
Of the painters whose work I have thus far studied more intensively, Paul Klee fascinates me quite particularly. Perhaps his own strong connection to music is the reason why his pictures speak to me so much. Throughout his life, his musicality had a great influence on how he approached form and colour. It was the visual realization of polyphony that particularly fascinated him, during very different phases in his artistic life. He believed that painting is in some ways even superior to music in matters of polyphonic depiction, since the different ‘voices’ in a picture can be perceived from beginning to end in their simultaneity, whereas in music they are subject to their movement through time. When I was preparing to write my Concerto per Klee I studied his diaries, his poems and various texts about his paintings and their connection to music. I became lost in the vastness of the material and in the end did not know any more where to begin. A purely atmospheric or synaesthetic transformation of one or several of his pictures seemed to me to be too narrow an approach. When I began writing, trusting my own intuition, it became increasingly clear that two ‘lifelong themes’ of Paul Klee were threading their way through the composition: polyphony and a profound (self-)irony. These two themes are present in the three movements of Concerto per Klee, which now bear the titles Polyphonie I, II and III. Later, when the work was almost finished, I came across three pictures ‘by chance’ that seemed to me particularly appropriate to the music. Thus it happened that their titles came to act as ‘subheadings’ for the three movements. The Concerto per Klee was written in spring 2007 and is dedicated in gratitude to Paul Klee, Steven Isserlis (whose playing I have admired for years) and Kitty Weinberger, who made this project possible.

Recordings

Pi-Chin Chien, Violoncello

Georgisches Kammerorchester Ingolstadt

Ruben Gazarian, Conductor

Ars Produktion - ARS 38 177 (P 2015)

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