works by
Galina Usvolskaya
Unsuk Chin
Walther Zimmermann
Karheinz Stockhausen
Franz Schubert
Wolfgang Rihm
Alexander Scriabin.

Dérive 2
History (of music and history in general) usually works in generalizations, simplifications and is usually presented to us like a linear succession of great successes – milestones and achievements. This history is presented like the history “of winners”, as if the main narrative is almost an epic of an inescapable course.

This certainly paints a misleading picture. Just below the surface we will find “histories” and narratives which belie such a version, running through all eras and periods. Important stories and ideas which, nevertheless, did not prevail, including artists who will either operate at the fringe of recognition or even whose contribution, if not ignored, will be praised for all the wrong reasons. Even during the classical era, which for some it constitutes the looking glass through which they will try to judge all other eras, previous and later ones, we will meet this persistent “tilted” viewpoint, a seconda prattica which will doubt, challenge and eventually subvert established ideas.

For a certain period, our contemporary age has allowed the retelling of these stories, in an often violent, ironic confrontation of the one, established narrative. It is some of these yarns of interwoven stories that we are trying to follow through our various musical driftings – Dérives.

If our first Dérive led us through a humid scenery, through cities which are literally or metaphorically sinking, our ramble will now take place in seemingly more solid if equally deceptive/fraudulent grounds. It is about a hike in the desert or in a wintery forest in the middle of an abandoned waste country. Still it is not a barren land: Life, wherever it is to be found, claims its rights. The agony unsettling many of these angst ridden landscapes, will be expressed with works bursting with intensity, austere, internal and declamatory whose existence both refutes and confirms Utopias.

The perfect clarity of the strict counterpoint of “the lady with the hammer” Galina Ustvolskaya's Second Sonata converses uniquely with the repetitions treated with mathematical precision by Karlheinz Stockhausen in his Klavierstueck ΙΧ. The crystallization and catharsis of form in the Zwei kleine Schwingungen by Wolfgang Rihm echoes the binary form of Ustvolskaya’s Sonata, while continually confronting the monolithic objectivity of Wustenwanderung by Walter Zimmermann on the one hand, and the multifaceted character of the Etudes by Unsuk Chin on the other. The fragmented nature of the Sonata D.571 by Franz Schubert - which is akin to the fragmentation of former works’ material - as well as the visionary finale of the last preludes op.74 by Alexander Skriabin enhance the emotional center of gravity of tonight’s concert.

Because Derive is no more than a pretext in order to reinstate questions about the musical structure, the material and their dialectic and thus we remember or familiarize with Art’s suggestions concerning itself and the perception of Life in times of less, equal or even more difficulty and struggle.

Text: Anargyros Deniosos

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