Detlev Glanert * Vier Fantasien für Klavier op. 15

[@felixdevilliers1]

I can't put this on my Facebook yet as my friends there already think I'm mad enough. Not that I think this music is mad except in a positive sense. It tells us the truth about our world. Not many people can face that - though I'm pleased to read that he has been quite successful.

[@felixdevilliers1]

Very impressive imaginative music. Wonderful use of the key board. No fear of tonal harmonies which are integrated into the modernism. I have to listen again.

[@sabaticl]

THANKS for putting this up. US premier 10/8 at CSO. Should be an interesting warmup to Brahms Violin Concerto & Brahms Symphony No. 1.

[@sabaticl]

+Leonid Feygin Leonid, Brahms is DEAD, Rip. Detlev Glanert and others live on. I'll post some reviews, we'll see.

[@sabaticl]

+Leonid Feygin That was a little too cryptic, sorry, am looking for the Glanert-Brahms-Fantasie, was premiered in Glasgow in 2012 csosoundsandstories.org/semyon-bychkov-makes-a-case-for-works-of-germanys-detlev-glanert/

[@sabaticl]

+Leonid Feygin Thanks just got this off the program, in English. Here: cso.org/media/program_notes/ProgramNotes_Brahms_Violin_Concerto.pdf Brahms-Fantasie, Heliogravure for Orchestra For Detlev Glanert, the great Germanic musical tradition is not a burden but an invitation to new realms of understanding. Glanert, who began to study composition at the age of twelve in his native Hamburg, moved to Cologne in the mid-1980s to work with Hans Werner Henze, the often highly political German opera composer, who has remained a guiding spirit throughout his career. Like Henze’s output, many of Glanert’s works are commentaries on the music of the past. His Symphony no. 1-one of his earliest compositions, written in 1985-is an exploration of Mahler’s vast symphonic landscape and even quotes from Das Lied von der Erde. “A symphony of today can only be a discussion of the symphonies of yesterday,” he once said. Mahler/Skizze, composed four years later, was inspired by a visit to Mahler’s grave. The Brahms-Fantasie performed this week offers another way of viewing the past in light of the present day. Although Glanert’s purely orchestral works often are satellite scores related to his large music theater pieces- Theatrum bestiarum, given its U.S. premiere by the Chicago Symphony in May 2010, is intimately tied to his opera Caligula-his Brahms-Fantasie is an independent score. It is one of four works commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony to serve as short companion pieces for Brahms’s four symphonies. Glanert’s offering-the last of the four to be composed- was designed to be performed on the same program as Brahms’s First Symphony, as it is this week in Chicago. Glanert has visited the world of Brahms’s music before, with his 2004 orchestration of the Four Serious Songs, where he not only enhanced Brahms’s songs with full orchestral colors (without changing a note of Brahms’s scores) but added his own preludes between them-a perfect demonstration of the balanced concern for both tradition and innovation that characterizes the newer Brahms-Fantasie. “We hear Brahms, yet don’t hear him,” Glanert says of the piece. “We hear my music, yet it isn’t entirely my music.” In that sense, this is one of his most advanced efforts yet in his quest to inhabit the musical worlds of the past and the present at the same time. Glanert subtitles the piece “Heliogravure for Orchestra,” referring to the two-part photographic process in which the original image is painted over and transformed by the artist. The result is a kind of musical palimpsest, in which strands of Brahms-the powerful opening of the First Symphony, snatches of Hungarian waltzes, rigorous counterpoint, the composer’s signature three-against-two rhythmic patterns-weave in and out of Glanert’s score. Glanert calls it “a picture puzzle, music about music, a mind game, and a fantasy along alien, yet familiar paths.” This Brahms-Fantasie reflects the composer’s career-long belief that all music has “to be connected to the life of people.” The fantasy is meant for listeners who have heard music that Brahms did not-the daring and adventurous explorations of the twentieth century that Arnold Schoenberg provocatively said were already latent in the seemingly traditional music of Brahms himself. For Glanert, all music, including the revered classics, “must tell you something about your life and something about what you are. . . . If it does not, it will die.”

[@sabaticl]

+Karl Young FYI we had to miss the program, here's a review. So far no recording of the Glanert Brahms Fantasie, I contacted the music house in London. chicagoclassicalreview.com/2015/10/capucons-fiery-playing-sparks-bychkovs-brahms-program-with-cso/

[@CarrieAnnBaade]

I love you.

[@RACHMNV]

This is a disgrace to classical music. Please find something else to do.