Fortissimo Spring 2018

Knussen in Basel
Tansy Davies
The Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel has announced the acquisition of
The Oliver Knussen Collection.
Founded in 1973 the foundation developed into a highly recognised
international research centre for the music of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, with some hundred estates and collections
from leading composers and performers including Igor Stravinsky,
Pierre Boulez, Béla Bartók, Edgar Varèse, Anton Webern, György
Ligeti, and Hans Werner Henze – to name just a few. Other British
composers with collections housed there include Sir Harrison
Birtwistle and Jonathan Harvey. Besides Knussen’s musical
manuscripts, the Collection – which has been made possible
thanks to the generous support of André Hoffmann – also includes
correspondence, programme booklets and reviews, as well as sound
recordings. It will be expanded on an ongoing basis.
The acquisition of the collection was marked on 14 February with
a concert by soprano Claire Booth and Ensemble Recherche which
included Knussen’s Reflection, Four Late Poems and an Epigram of
Rainer Maria Rilke, Cantata, and the Whitman Settings, alongside
George Benjamin’s Olicantus (in a previously unpublished version
for piano) as well as music by Carter, Henze and Stravinsky.
The concert also included Patrick Gallois giving the premiere of
the revised version of Knussen’s Study for ‘Metamorphosis’ for solo
bassoon, a 5-and-a-half-minute work originally written in April 1972
and revised especially for the Sacher concert, with a new dedication
‘to the memory of Alan Stout, American composer, teacher and
polymath, a dear friend for 50 years.’ The Metamorphosis of the title
is Kafka’s, on which Knussen had once planned to base a large piece.
Knussen has described this study as ‘a cartoon’ for the larger project.
Since the premiere of her award-winning opera Between
Worlds in 2014, Tansy Davies has been enjoying
increased international exposure, with Forest, her recent
concerto for four horns and orchestra, commissioned
by the Philharmonia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic,
and Warsaw Autumn Festival. Now, with a residency at
Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and Cave, a chamber
opera opening this summer, Davies looks set to cement
her position as one of the most interesting and individual
composers of her generation.
Concertgebouw residency
The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam has announced Davies as its next
Composer in Residence for the 18/19 season. The role will truly see
Davies ‘in residence’; residing in Amsterdam for several months,
she will lead workshops with young composers and collaborate on
special performances of her music by students of the Conservatorium
of Amsterdam. To crown the residency, Davies will write a new work
for the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble, to be premiered in May 2019.
Other events already announced include a performance of her Song
of Pure Nothingness, as well as the reed quintet Calefax premiering a
new transcription of The Beginning of the World (by their bass clarinet
player Jelte Althuis) in December 2018.
Shedding new light on ‘Undertow’
In early March, members of the London Sinfonietta premiered a
newly revised version of Davies’s Undertow for five players as part
of the London element of Contemporary Music for All’s weekend
festival. Composed in 1999 for flute, clarinet, piano, violin and
viola, Davies’s reworking retains the original structure whilst
recalibrating dynamics, voicings and tempi. New light is shedding
on the material through re-orchestration, and Davies describes
the resulting colours as made ‘more vivid’ and the textures ‘more
visceral and sensual’ than before, all of which accentuates the music’s
dramatic structure.
12 ensemble revive ‘Residuum’
Residuum, Davies’s 10-minute work for two solo violins, solo cello
and strings from 2005, has been selected as part of the PRS Resonate
Project. It will be revived by the London-based 12 ensemble during
their 18/19 season. Davies describes the work as ‘an imaginary replay
of the residual energy of Dowland’s ‘Galliard to Lachrymae’, heard
like an echo of ancient music in a modern time’.
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IMAGES: OLIVER KNUSSEN © HANA ZUSHI-RHODES, ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC
EXCERPT FROM ‘STUDY FOR METAMORPHOSIS’ BY OLIVER KNUSSEN © FABER MUSIC