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Ketil Hvoslef - Quartetto per Archi nr. V (2021)
(b. Bergen, July 19th 1939)
First performance: December 6th 2023, Gunnar Sævigsal, Bergen
Ricardo Odriozola and Terézia Mušutová, violins
Sara Evensen, viola
Johanna Saaek, cello
Ketil Hvoslef was born in Bergen on July 19th 1939. He is the youngest son of Harald Sæverud and Marie Hvoslef. He arrived at a propitious time, since his birth coincided with the completion of Siljustøl, the great mansion in the outskirts of Bergen where the Sæverud family settled and where his father lived until his passing in 1992. It also proved to be a haven during the Nazi invasion of Norway in the Second World War.
Being the son of a great composer, music was naturally very present during his upbringing. He learned to play the piano and the viola and, in his teens, he became heavily involved in Bergen's jazz and pop music environment, becoming a member of what was, reportedly, Bergen's first rock band. Hvoslef (who retained the Sæverud surname until his 40th birthday, when he decided to adopt that of his mother) had, however, plans to become a painter and took serious steps in that direction. It was in the Bergen Art Academy that he met the painter Inger Bergitte Flatebø (1938 - 2008), who would become his wife and adopt the Sæverud surname.
With the birth of their first child, Trond, in 1962, Hvoslef realized that he needed to provide for his family and, abandoning his dreams to become either a pop star or a painter he took an organist's diploma at the Bergen Music Conservatoire. Upon finishing his studies, he was offered a position as theory teacher at the Conservatoire by its director, the legendary Gunnar Sævig (1924 - 1969).
Hvoslef became a composer almost by accident. In his 25th year he composed a piano concertino for his own satisfaction. Shortly after, his father passed on to him a commission for a woodwind quintet he had no time or inclination to write. Since then Hvoslef has received a fairly steady stream of commissions and his work list counts with some 160 compositions to date. Hvoslef always enjoys a challenge and he has often written for unusual or seemingly "hopeless" instrumental combinations, always using the limitations of the ensemble as a stimulant for his imagination. He has written for large orchestra, for a great variety of chamber ensembles and for solo instruments. He has composed twenty concertos and three operas.
He was the Festival Composer in the Bergen International festival in 1990 and has received several prizes such as the Norwegian Composers' Society's "work of the year" in four occasions (1978, 1980, 1985 and 1992) and TONO's Edvard Prisen in 2011.
Hvoslef's music is characterized by great transparency and by a conscious building of tension achieved by accumulating latent energy. He wants his listeners to lean forward and listen rather than sit back and be lulled into a reverie. Listening to a Hvoslef composition is always an adventure. One never knows what to expect. He stretches sections of the music almost to breaking point and only then introduces a new idea. His music has a classical clarity and transparency and is therefore always easy to follow. Although his highly personal and concentrated language is very much of its time, Hvoslef is not averse to using material that is recognizably tonal (such as major and minor triads) albeit always in a context that sets these familiar sounds in conflict with their surroundings. Rhythm is a very prominent aspect of Hvoslef’s music. Although the vast majority of his production is notated in 4/4 metre, his rhythmical patterns almost never conform to it, always favouring patterns of odd-numbered notes.
Ketil Hvoslef is, without a doubt, one of the greatest composers to emerge from Scandinavia in the second half of the Twentieth Century and one of the truly original masters of our time.
Hvoslef wrote his 5th string quartet without commission in 2021. Applications had been sent to finance the writing of his 13 violin duos (mph 4735) and this quartet. The duos received funding, while the quartet did not. He wrote it anyway and dedicated it to this writer, to be played with students from the Grieg Academy. The occasion for the premiere presented itself in the fall of 2023 as part of the Grieg Academy’s Sinfonietta series.
Quartetto per Archi nr. V is a continuation of Hvoslef’s lifelong project. It is recognizably his, in the sense that no other composer could have written it. In Hvoslef’s music we find, very generally, two types of compositions: those that bring back material and those that do not. His previous string quartet (mph 4213) belongs largely to the latter category. This latest quartet is a mixture of both types, with a much stronger leaning towards development and reinstatement of musical ideas. It does, all the same, contain several episodes that stand alone in the structure, contributing to its cumulative impact.
Hvoslef once said, in conversation with Oliver Fraenzke in 2017, that the diminished fifth of the Blues was what awakened him to music as a child. The opening motif of the Fifth Quartet can thus be seen as the composer’s tribute to the early spark that started him on his musical path. The five-note motif is heard three more times before it seamingly disappears from view after measure 175. ‘Seamingly’ because a different five-note motif appears in mm. 371-397. A dialogue between the viola and cello – backed by distant repeated notes from the violins – is the feature of these 27 measures. The initial motif – m. 371 in the viola, answered by the cello in mm. 383-384 – is an almost exact transposition of the pitch collection found in the “Blues” motif at the beginning, with the notes in a different order. Hvoslef then further develops the idea by changing the intervals and the shape of the motif but retaining the five-note shape (see mm. 391, viola and 396-397, cello). He also adds two further notes to the melodic idea (m. 380, viola and 386, cello) and brings in a new shape before it (m. 389, viola and 394-395, cello). This episode and its relation to the work’s opening motif is a good example of Hvoslef’s playful testing of the listener’s attention and memory. Over ten minutes separate the beginning of the piece and the section described above. It is not the same melody but there is a curious resemblance that makes the attentive listener sit up and wonder…
A section that definitely returns in its initial form is the opening “theme” – mm. 2-26. It consists of a jagged, staccato first violin melody, always caught by the other instruments with the same sustained chord at the end of each zigzagging line. Hvoslef obviously attaches great importance to this material, since he brings it back, in an obvious manner, three more times. Measures 540-560 are an exact reprise of the opening material. In mm. 561-573 (and earlier in mm. 175-188) the theme is played starkly in unison, with no sustained harmony and with an extended ending. A further variant of this material occurs directly after its final unison statement: a nervous hocket between the first violin and the rest of the group in mm. 575-580. The single quavers are now doubled into two semiquavers, both in the 1st violin melody and the repeated chord in the other instruments. The dynamic is hushed before a final ff unison leads to the conclusion of the work: an eight-measure choral earlier heard several times in the piece, now played pp. It is as unceremonious an end to the piece as can be imagined.
Many more delights inhabit this quartet.
The aforementioned choral – in which only the cello and first violin have moving voices – is first insinuated in mm. 38-41 before it appears in its full form in mm. 55-62. Between these statements we get two sober comments from the cello and a very shy first violin trying, in vain, to unsettle the stoic second violin tremolo. An ascending line – mm. 70-77 – gives rise to a lovely, hermetically formed melody in the first violin: the row of pitches repeats in different configurations, always maintaining the same two outer notes. This plays against an implacable series of sharp accents followed by a soft sustained chord from the other instruments – mm. 77-99. What follows is an uninhibited and necessary release of energy in the form of a rather aggressive hocket among all the instruments, with the violins occasionally playing the same rhythm – mm. 100-115. The receding final chord gives way to a typical Hvoslef unison passage, all playing in the same octave. The phrases are, again, typically separated by rather long silences. After the last of these, our old friend the eight-bar choral makes a reappearance before the group returns to the unison passage, now in more subdued dynamics – mm. 147-155. The viola is left to carry on the ostinato while, surprise! yet a new version of the opening theme appears: the first violin plays the melody in legato fashion, with the second violin and cello responding with their fixed harmony – mm. 156-174. We don’t fully realize what is taking place before, as mentioned earlier, a staccato recap of the opening theme appears on m. 176. Then, an entirely new idea: a chromatic motif consisting of five quaver triplets, in note groups of 6, 5 and 4 – very tricky to play! The cello underpins the first note of each group as the other instruments join, one by one. The dynamic wanes and waxes with an unexpected increase of tempo leading to the next section via two ascending pizzicato lines from the viola and cello. Measures 243-267 (including the ascending viola and cello lines in mm. 239-242) constitute another wholly typical Hvoslef passage. Repeated thirds are passed between the violins. The first violin plays f while the muted second violin responds in pp. The cello plays with both, alternating between normal f notes and pp harmonics. It is a veritable workout for the cellist, skipping between worlds, as it were. All the while, the viola takes a back seat, holding an unwavering perfect fourth. After all this withheld energy, a new outburst – identical to the one in mm. 100-115 – is in order, now intensified by the occasional crotchets turned into four semiquavers. The contrast with the next section – another characteristic Hvoslef “frozen counterpoint” sequence played pp without vibrato – could hardly be greater (mm. 287-316).
In m. 317 the cello begins to play tenderly repeated up-bow strokes on a single note, a string technique resulting in an expression beloved by Hvoslef. The violins develop – not quite tentatively, not quite assertively – a rising and falling cantabile melodic figure. In m. 345 the violins splinter into dainty triplets as the viola and cello turn their previous harmony into repeated staccato chords. In m. 361 all instruments coalesce into a square, repeated rhythm only to fall out of sync, in pairs, one semiquaver at a time. After this startling episode follows the viola and cello dialogue described earlier (mm. 371-404). The implacable rhythm in the violins reinforces the bluesy or early jazz feeling of the passage.
The next section (mm. 404-424) is a textbook example of Hvoslef’s mastery in building up tension by withholding energy. The repeating sparse viola figure (see mm. 412-415) covers 14 beats, of which 12 are silent. This figure adheres to one whole-tone scale together with the low held C on the cello. The violins adhere to the other whole-tone scale, with the repeated notes in the second violin and the descending tremolo line in the first. The cello and second violin carry on while the viola bursts in with an energetic triplet figure, echoed by the first violin (mm. 428-432). This is soon taken up in unison by violins and viola with the cello providing a straight backbeat. The bubble bursts, as it were, and the violins are left alone with the triplet figures played pp and in canon – another tricky section to play – as the viola and cello sneak in with a repeated series of eight harmonics, eventually joined by the second violin. This “glass harmonica” effect creates an otherworldly atmosphere. And, what should reappear amidst this bliss? A new version of the main theme! …played almost sneakily by the first violin, softly, in the low register and sul ponticello.
Not knowing what to expect next, Hvoslef gives us, as usual, the unexpected in the form of a playful, almost mischievous episode, characteristically overflowing with empty spaces and constantly throwing the feeling of metre off kilter (mm. 465-485). This brief section spins out of control at m. 485, opening for a short breather in the form of a dialogue between wispy pp semiquavers on different instruments answered, oracle-like, by a concerted trio of violins and viola playing five unison f notes. This is another sideways reference the opening five-note motif.
Hvoslef wrote this quartet at roughly the same age his father, Harald Sæverud, was when he wrote his third quartet (mph 4045). The importance of the number 5 is common to both compositions. Far-fetched and esoteric as it may appear, this is too much of a coincidence to simple let it pass by.
Most of what remains of the quartet has already been described (m. 540 to the end). This final section, however, is preceded by a build up of tension of formidable power, even by Hvoslef’s standards. While the first violin and viola build a sequence of dissonant chords with, as usual, rests between them, the cello – with its tremolo on the bottom C – plays in conjunction with the second violin’s rising line. These two have pauses of their own that, of course, do not – but once – correspond to those of the viola and 1st violin. This all takes place with a continuous and very gradual crescendo that reaches ff – Hvoslef’s highest dynamic – to great effect in m. 538 before the return of the main theme in three different forms and the aforementioned eight-bar choral at the very end.
Hvoslef achieves all these delights – rhythmic, melodic, dynamic and formal – without even once changing time signature.
With his fifth string quartet Hvoslef has delivered a particularly strong and sturdy composition. It holds a steady balance between development and free imagination. Each section of the work, whether repeated or exposed only once, contributes to the construction of a fascinating musical edifice that bears repeated scrutiny and exploration. That Hvoslef has managed this feat in the vast majority of his compositions is a wonder in itself, That he continues to surprise and delight his listeners with strong, original compositions well into his eighties is worthy of admiration and gratitude.
Ricardo Odriozola 2. February 2024
German preface not available ...
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