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Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Pieces for Orchestra: ‘Extremely charming and expressive’

The music of the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen (1952) is highly poetic and often has a strong visual expressiveness. He paints with a fine brush; his work sounds transparent like a watercolour. – As e.g. in the highly successful fairytale-like Winternacht, which he composed early in his career. Often his music balances on the edge of silence. On 5 June Sir Simon Rattle will conduct Abrahamsen’s Three Pieces for Orchestra in Concertgebouw Amsterdam, as part of his farewell tour with the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Hans Abrahamsen

‘What you hear are images – essentially the music is already there’, he once said. Just as Michelangelo only had to ‘liberate’ his sculptures from the stone, Abrahamsen ‘digs out’ the arrangement of sounds that form his compositions. Thus he creates a sensual and spatial sound world, in which various ideas flow organically into one another. Occasionally, however, the Arcadian peace is disturbed by bouncing rhythms and loud dissonances.

A recent highlight is the meditative song cycle let me tell you for soprano and orchestra (2013), which he composed at the request of the soprano Barbara Hannigan. The text is composed of the 481 words Ophelia speaks in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. Hannigan premiered this intensely lyrical piece with the Berliner Philharmonic Orchestra, who also commissioned the Three Pieces for Orchestra. They premiered it on 26 May in Philharmonie Berlin and will introduce it to the Netherlands on June 5th in Concertgebouw Amsterdam.

Three Pieces for Orchestra is an arrangement, or rather reinterpretation of three of his Ten Studies for piano solo, which he composed between 1984 and 1998. In this work he investigates ‘the soul of the piano, formed by all the music that has been composed for it since its inception’. The cycle is divided into four segments, consisting of four, three, two and one part respectively. These connect successively with the Romantic era, Afro-American music and the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.

The concluding Le trombe del mattino refers to Italy, ‘the land of light’. The different languages are of vital importance to Abrahamsen: ‘They determine the associations of the listener. There may be a world of difference between a ‘Traum’ song, a ‘Drømmersong’ and a ‘Dream Song’. As early as 2004 he orchestrated the first, rather Schumannesque studies, simply titled Four Pieces for Orchestra.

For Three Pieces for Orchestra he arranged the next three movements, in the original cycle called ‘English Studies’. The first, ‘With a restless and painful expression’ has the characteristic angular swing of the American boogie-woogie that became popular in the 1920ies. ‘Calmly moving’ is mainly set in the higher registers, where Glockenspiel, celesta and piccolos create a naive and innocent atmosphere. In the concluding movement, ‘Heavy’, the bass register is dominant.

Abrahamsen dedicated his piece to Sir Simon Rattle, who is making his farewell tour as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. On the programme is also the completed version of Bruckner’s Symphony number 9. ‘The seven minutes of Three Pieces for Orchestra are wonderful, really wonderful music’, wrote a German critic. ‘It’s an extremely charming, very expressive work.’

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Let me tell you Hans Abrahamsen – Ophelia resumes control

Hans Abrahamsen hopes to celebrate his 70th birthday in December 2022, but is already a central composer in NTR ZaterdagMatinee. On 29 January his Horn Concerto received its belated Dutch premiere; in May Asko|Schönberg will perform his trilogy Winternacht / Wald / Schnee and a month later his opera The Snow Queen, based on an Andersen fairy-tale, will get its first performance in The Netherlands. On Saturday 12 February his song cycle Let me tell you will sound for the second time in this radio series.

Abrahamsen wrote Let me tell you for the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, who premiered it in 2013 with the Berlin Philharmonic, ensuring his international breakthrough. In February 2014 Hannigan sang the first Dutch performance both with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in Rotterdam, and with the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Amsterdam. Now she returns for a second run in NTRZaterdagMatinee.

Hans Abrahamsen

BLINDING RAYS OF LIGHT

Let me tell you continues to deeply impress both critics and audience. ‘An effervescent fountain sprays indefinable, high-pitched sounds of glockenspiel, woodwinds and violins, making the power of Ophelia’s love tangible’, wrote Biëlla Luttmer in de Volkskrant, after its Dutch premiere. She described the sweeping brushes in the death scene at the end as ‘a snow scene from Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg congealed into sound’.

In 2016, Abrahamsen was awarded the authoritative American Grawemeyer Award. A year later, the serene song cycle was released on a CD, again incurring rave reviews. According to the daily newspaper NRC, a ‘magical prism of sound’ was transformed into ‘blinding rays of light or downy snowfall’; The Guardian heard a ‘typically spare and wintry’ orchestral sound, offering ‘a magical panoply of spangly microtonal sounds’. The Gramophone dubbed it ‘a small, tragic Winterreise’.

Abrahamsen composed Let me tell you at the request of Barbara Hannigan, who was impressed by his subtle use of colour and the emotional eloquence of his music. In an interview with yours truly, she said: ‘I admire his originality and gentleness.’ She added: ‘I have gone through all the possibilities of my voice with Hans, but have made it clear to him that boundaries can always be broken.’

481 WORDS

The title Let me tell you is taken from Paul Griffiths’ 2008 novella of the same name, in which Ophelia tells her story in exactly the 481 words Shakespeare allows her to speak in Hamlet. By arranging these differently each time, Griffiths creates a kind of autobiography, in which Ophelia reflects on her life. In about thirty minutes, she transforms from a defenceless victim into a self-confident woman who resumes control over her fate.

‘In some 30 minutes Ophelia transforms from a defenceless victim into a self-confident woman who resumes control over her fate.’

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Griffiths composed a libretto of seven songs, divided over three movements. In the first, ‘Let me tell you how it was’, Ophelia looks back to a time when there was ‘no music’ in her life. With high piccolo tones and bell-like sounds of a celesta, Abrahamsen sketches a tenuous, dreamlike world in which each and every movement seems to be solidified. The soprano gropes her way through stratospheric heights and abyssal lows, with sustained tones; sometimes with a stuttering voice that evokes Monteverdi’s stile concitato.

The second movement, ‘Let me tell you how it is’, is a passionate declaration of love to Hamlet – ‘you have sun-blasted me / and turned me to light’. The music is agile and passionate, with fierce coloraturas from the soprano and swirling cascades of crystalline sounds after her sighed ‘You have made me like glass – like glass in an ecstasy from your light / like glass in which light rained’.

FEET SHUFFLING IN THE SNOW

In the concluding movement, ‘I know you are there,’ Ophelia looks to the future: ‘I will find you’, she sings, as she steps into a snowy world full of identical frost flowers. The serenity of the first movement returns, with spun out lines of the soprano swaying on a sea of fragile, slowly drifting sound fabrics.

‘I will go on’, she concludes, while a percussionist imitates her shuffling feet in the snow by rubbing a sheet of paper over a large drum. While the music slowly fades away, a question floats up from the almost sacred silence: does Ophelia die, or does she enter a new life?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJNfpPoM3ug

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🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBC #Radio3's #NightTracks Hans Abrahamsen, Barbara Hannigan, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra & Andris Nelsons: 🎵 let me tell you (final mvt: I will go out now) #BBCRadio3 #HansAbrahamsen #BarbaraHannigan #BavarianRadioSymphonyOrchestra #AndrisNelsons

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBC #Radio3's #NightTracks Hans Abrahamsen & Arditti Quartet: 🎵 String Quartet No. 4: IV. Gently "Rocking" - With Utmost Sensitivity, Babbling #BBCRadio3 #HansAbrahamsen #ArdittiQuartet ▶️ 🪄 Automagic 🔊 show 📻 playlist on Spotify ▶️ Track on #Spotify:

String Quartet No. 4: IV. Gent...

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBC #Radio3's #InConcert Hans Abrahamsen, Jennifer France, London Philharmonic Orchestra & Edward Gardner: 🎵 Let Me Tell You #BBCRadio3 #HansAbrahamsen #JenniferFrance #LondonPhilharmonicOrchestra #EdwardGardner

Hans Abrahamsen’s Let Me Tell You. Taken from Paul Griffiths’ novel using only the vocabulary that Ophelia speaks in Hamlet. Beautiful music. #NowListening #ClassicalMusic #Vinyl #HansAbrahamsen #PaulGriffiths #BarbaraHannigan #AndrisNelsons

"H. Abrahamsen: Let Me Tell You" by Hans Abrahamsen, Barbara Hannigan, Andris Nelsons, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra https://songwhip.com/hansabrahamsen/h-abrahamsen-let-me-tell-you
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https://open.spotify.com/album/5RpogjWbEWPt8C8QUuyYxl?si=LZFot-BvRR-2zeJTGakalg