Patricia Kopatchinskaja - Marton Illes: Bowed Spaces - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

George Antheil called himself a 'Pianist-Futurist'. A lover of speed, cars and airplanes, the American composer settled in the Paris of the Années Folles, where he frequented Picasso and Stravinsky, and composed works such as Sonate sauvage and Jazz Sonata, which caused a scandal during a concert in Budapest, he even brandished a Chicago gangster-style pistol to restore silence in the hall... He hero-worshipped Beethoven, whose pieces he played in the first part of his recitals before moving onto his own music. In 1933, he returned to the United States where he met John Cage and Morton Feldman. Patkop and the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen - whom The Times, following what the journalist described as 'one of those concerts you remember for ever', presented as the violinist's 'doppelgänger'! - pay tribute to the 'Bad Boy of Music'.

Pierrot lunaire, premiered in Berlin in 1912, is a series of twenty-one short melodramas for voice and five instruments on German translations of poems by Albert Giraud. Here the composer first introduces Sprechgesang (speech-song), a technique that revolutionised declamation. Schoenberg wanted the piece to be ironic, at once tender and grotesque, in the manner of cabaret songs. Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the violinist who is also an occasional actress, had long dreamt of playing and reciting this unique work. It was a pain in her arm preventing her from playing the violin that one day propelled her into the role of narrator 'All my life I have felt that I was Pierrot. Every time I played this piece on the violin when I was a student, I would say the words in my head.' She has now played and performed Pierrot in many venues around the world, including the Berlin Philharmonie, several cities in the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden. Now she has assembled a number of her musician friends and decided to record it for posterity. Schoenberg's Phantasy op.47 and Six Little Piano Pieces op.19 complete the programme, along with works by Webern (Four Pieces for violin and piano op.7) and Schoenberg's arrangement of Johann Strauss's Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz) op.437.

This programme brings together composers who, for the most part, were compelled to flee their homeland. In 1920, Ivan Wyschnegradsky took refuge in Paris, where he wrote for a quarter-tone piano at a time when, in Russia, the slightest dissonance was considered a political provocation. Andrzej Panufnik left his native Poland in 1954. Alfred Schnittke settled in Hamburg in 1990, eight years before his death, having spent most of his life in the Soviet Union. Although Schubert never moved away from Vienna, the pain and solitude of his inner exile are palpable in his music. Finally, the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugene Ysaye emigrated on account of the First World War and it was in the United States, in 1917, that he wrote the melancholy musical poem recorded here, which he called Exil! Is exile nothing but pain and isolation, or also a source of inspiration which, with music, expresses what words cannot say, acting as the ultimate refuge? 'Let's listen to what they have to say', suggests Patricia Kopatchinskaja, herself 'uprooted for ever'. She is joined by cellist Thomas Kaufmann and her friends from Camerata Bern.