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Ricardo Odriozola - Leaving Home, piano trio (2004)
(b. 1965)
1st performance: 27. June 2004, Dorf Gamleskole, Denmark
Einar Røttingen, piano
Ricardo Odriozola, violin
John Ehde, cello
RICARDO ODRIOZOLA was born in Bilbao in 1965. He started studying the violin at the age of 9 and graduated from the Bilbao conservatoire in 1982. He then spent a year as exchange student in Arlington (near Boston) finishing his high school and serving as concertmaster of the Greater Boston Youth Symphony orchestra. In 1987 he obtained a bachelor degree in performance from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester (NY). That same year he moved to Bergen (Norway) and began teaching at the Bergen Music Conservatoire (now Grieg Academy), where he is now associate professor of violin and chamber music.
Ricardo Odriozola began writing music at the age of 10. The earliest composition he recognizes (a piano sextet) dates from 1984. Since then he has written more than 40 works (chamber music, solo, songs and orchestral music) and arranged a great deal of music by other composers. Several of his works appear on CD. In January 2015 he released his first CD dedicated exclusively to his music: “Views from my Horse” (www.amethyst-records.com).
Although he has never taken lessons in composition, Ricardo Odriozola has received guidance and inspiration from many prominent composers, particularly from Western Norway, and has built his craft by reading thousands of scores and listening to concerts and recordings. Ricardo Odriozola’s music is, however, primarily informed by his wide experience as a performer. He always strives to produce scores that are performer-friendly and music that can communicate directly with the listener without the aid of intellectual filters.
Leaving Home was written for a special day of concerts to celebrate the 70th birthday of the Norwegian weaver Ragnhild Kjølberg, a resident of Denmark for many decades. Her concert series at her home in Dorf, near Dronninglund, had been running for 25 years at the time of the celebration in June 2004. Many of my closest colleagues and I have played in Kjølberg's series through the years. In this occasion she brought together Einar Røttingen, John Ehde and I to play Tchaikovsky's piano trio and she asked me to contribute with a new composition for the occasion. This became the piano trio Leaving Home. Five years later we officially became Valen Trio.
Leaving Home was a hard piece to write and one that, given the choice, I would have preferred not to write. This has nothing to do with the occasion, which was a happy one in every respect. I would have written a piece for it anyway. The reason for the above statement is that the events that made it necessary for me to write the piece were not pleasant. I had to wring every phrase out of me with sweat and tears. It became a kind of therapy for me to compose it. It is one of my "story pieces". I will not divulge what the story is, but can, in retrospect, say that of all pieces I have written with that approach, this one is by far the most successful. I still can hear the piece or read its score and say "yes, it was so".
As is often the case with my story pieces, names of places and characters as well as telephone numbers appear encrypted. There are also many oblique references to several pieces of music that are relevant to the story, either directly or by association. The composers and songwriters from whom I have drawn material to enhance the narrative are, in order of appearance, C. W. Glück, Leonard Cohen, Lars Horntvedt, Martin Horntvedt, A folk Polish mountain song, Peter Hammill, a folk song from Bermeo (Biscay), J.S. Bach and Simon Jeffes.
Although the music follows the narrative extremely closely, it is meant to work as pure music. All music elicits emotions and in Leaving Home it is easy enough to follow the different emotional states it traverses: loneliness - reawakening to the possibility of happiness - joy - longing - bustle - return to home-like bliss - doubt - disappointment - despair - loneliness - joy in loneliness - reluctant acceptance of grim reality.
I rate Leaving Home as one of the best and most authentic pieces I have written, which may sound odd, since I have borrowed so much music by other writers in it. It achieves what it set out to do to a larger extent than most of my other compositions and, in retrospect, I am glad I wrote it.
Ricardo Odriozola, Drammen 28.12.2021
German preface not available ...
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