Veebikontsert. Uudislooming II

Alireza Farajianhamedani (1993)
„Let the fluid of your thoughts take you wherever it wants“

Katariina Matikainen (klaver)

In this piece the composer is trying to create a natural atmosphere through free tempo (determined liberty) and extended techniques. Also, rhetoric and aesthetic elements, which are applied in the musical form, are used. An attempt has been made to restore the lost freedom to the musician. In this piece there are some moments that the player does not play anything but he/she keeps the pedal, they are rest and space for digesting the previous things that we heard.

Eladio Aguilar (1997)
„Scape II“

Heljä Viirakivi (sopran)
Fortunato García Piquer (klaver)

Scape II is the remake of Scape I. A story obout desperation, sadness and frustation. The mail character (in Scape II a Soprano) travels around different deep emotions and feelings with only one goal…. to escape!

Julia Janiak (1995)
„Lost and found”

Judith Hänsel (viiul)
Kristjan Kannukene (vioola)

Lost and found is a study about the deep meaning of the words „connection“ and „disconnection“. It was written in 2019 and performed for the first time in Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław, Poland.

Andrea Sordano (1996)
„Ein Körnchen Sands”

Sven-Sander Šestakov (klaver)
Adla Cameselle Barbosa (tšello)
Heljä Viirakivi (sopran)

It is arduous to describe a single poem by Paul Celan without including his whole opera. Most of his works are related and connected to each other. These connections can be spotted in both, between collections and among poems of the same collection. One of the main features of his poetry, especially in the first period (1948–1955, year when he moved to Paris), is the usage of recurrent themes or sceneries. Ein Körnchen Sands starts with the word Stein [rock, stone]. The stone is an element that occurs in other poems (Ich hörte sagen, In Gestalt eines Ebers…) and is a metaphor of the petrified world of the „submerged”. It is the nostalgic remembrance of the first Threshold, the shade of the tough past. This remembrance did not dissolve. It just took other shapes: a tree, a bird, a grain of sand.

The middle part of the poem introduces a marine scenery. In all his poems this refers to an amorous setting and suggest that Celan is most likely talking about a person he loved. Since this collection (Von Schwelle zu Schwelle) gathers poems written between 1945 and 1952 (his absconding period) he might be talking about Ruth Lackner. She was a Yiddish actress, probably his first love, who helped him to escape from the Nazi deportation. We can consider her as his saviour. She is probably Ein Vogel (the bird) who saved Celan from the Boden von Tod (the bottom of death).

Pain, despair, hope and love cohabit in this poem, united. The night, seat of the shadows, sanctioned this union. The feat of the night is to dominate not only the personal past, but all the terrible legacy of his generation.

In the music I tried to incorporate this union by using ambiguous harmonies, extraneous sounds, and conflicting sections, without being descriptive. The material is partially taken by a Schubert’s lied Letzte Hoffnung, from Die Winterreise. This lied follows, almost exactly, the same dramatic structure of Celan’s poem. Moreover, different elements appear in both poems and have the same role (e.g. the tree, the leaf, the wind, the earth). Even though these poems have been written in a very different period, they still have some connections. Thus, this was my mission as a composer. I tried to translate this connection in music and give the audience the chance to feel the journey from suffering through hope… without reaching a real destination.

Andrea Sordano, 2020

Ein Körnchen Sands

Stein, aus dem ich dich schnitzt,
als die Nacht ihre Wälder verheerte:
ich schnitzt dich als Baum
und hüllt dich ins Braun meines leisesten Spruchs
wie in Borke –
Ein Vogel,
der rundesten Träne entschlüpft,
regt sich wie Laub über dir:
du kannst warten,
bis unter allen den Augen ein Sandkorn dir aufglimmt,
ein Körnchen Sands,
das mis träumen half,
als ich niedertaucht, dich zu finden –
Du treibst ihm die Wurzel entgegen,
die dich flügge macht, wenn der Boden von Tod glüht,
du reckst dich empor,
und ich schweb dir voraus als ein Blatt,
das weiß, wo die Tore sich auftun.

From Von Schwelle zu Schwelle. (From Threshold to Threshold) Gedichte.
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1955

A grain of sand

Stone, out of which I’ve carved you,
When night would harry her forests:
I carved you as a tree
draping you into the brown of my softest sentence
as in bark –
A bird,
hatched out of the roundest of tears
stirring like leaves above you:
you can wait,
until under everybody’s eyes a grain of sand glimmers for you,
a grain of sand,
that helped me dream,
when I submerged to find you –
You sprout your root towards it,
Which makes you fledged, when the soil’s glowing of death,
You strain aloft,
and I waft before you, a leaf
that knows where the gates will open.

English translation by Stephan Meier

Sofie Meyer (1991)
„Chemin du Jour“

Mette Hommel (flööt)

The piece is a travel through daylight. It seeks to correlate sounds of nature with the human experience of it.

Viktoria Grahv (1984) / animaator Bruno Quast (1994)
„Ma hingan lihtsalt rohkem“

The short film is based on the electroacoustic track by composer Viktoria Grahv „Ma hingan lihtsalt rohkem“. While the music grew out of the concept of breathing as a ceaseless strength to break loose from chains, the animation reworks this theme, visualising the perceived inner movement of an anxiety attack and embodying the process of dealing with it. The whole project became for the composer and the animator an act of healing both self-directed as shared, approaching the intertwined, choking knot of breath and fear, issues even more diffused in the current worldwide situation.