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Ketil Hvoslef - Beethoven Trio for clarinet, cello and piano
(b. July 19th 1939, Bergen)
(1997 – rev. 1999)
First performance: Bergen, February 7th 1999
Tone hagerup, clarinet; Jörg Berning, cello; Signe Bakke, piano
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’s music is always exciting and energizing, sometimes perplexing, often funny and mischievous, but only very seldom is it sinister.
Beethoven Trio is one of those rare Hvoslef works that, besides the usual traits germane to its composer, conveys a sense of unease and even danger in the listener.
The commission – from the Bergen Philharmonic cellist Jörg Berning – to write a piece for the same ensemble as Beethoven’s Trio op. 11 granted Hvoslef a new occasion to pay homage to the great German master. In contrast to the sombre theme he chose for his “Beethoven-Fantasi” for solo piano (from 1982, a particularly fertile year for Hvoslef), for the trio he chose the unambiguously cheerful theme from the last movement of Beethoven’s op. 11.
The way it is first presented is less than auspicious: on top of a pulsating piano and some cello tremolos and glissandos, the clarinet plays Beethoven’s theme in the lowest register and very softly. The problem is that the clarinet is missing some notes down there, and parts of the theme are silent. It is early in the piece and one may take this as a clever joke although, somehow, it veers a tad too much towards the peculiar to feel comfortably funny. We are soon put at ease by the piano playing the melody and bass of Beethoven’s theme, accompanied by an Alberti figure in the clarinet. Soon, however, the first real spanner is thrown in the works: the cello emerges with a foreign note played fortissimo with snap pizzicatos. Undeterred, the clarinet takes up the entire theme with the piano providing harmony and rhythm. The theme is suspended before its final bar (measure 38) uncovering the cello still repeating its earlier foreign note, but now very softly. It is here that we fully realize that this is not going to be an easy ride. The cello has gotten hold of the proceedings, opening up for all manner of musical mischief. From here to the end we, as listeners, are exposed to a game of hide and seek in which being found may not carry the happiest of consequences. Insofar as it is a game, it certainly is one for the grown-ups.
From a technical perspective, Hvoslef uses Beethoven’s merry tune as a reservoir of motifs to developed and set against his own ideas.
At a deeper level, the music seems keen to embrace peril and court potential disaster. It is, of course, not in Hvoslef’s nature to indulge in bombast and the overtly theatrical. However close to the abyss he may take the listener, he always remains in full control and always rescues the music in the nick of time from falling or self-annihilation. Hardly anywhere in his production is this more apparent than in Beethoven Trio.
The entire work consists of 491 measures in common time yet, hardly ever – outside of the Beethoven quotations – is one sure of where the beat or the “one” actually is. The piece begins in the third beat of the bar, creating metric uncertainty from the outset. By way of ostinati with an odd number of notes, cascades of tutti semiquavers with accents in unpredictable places or rhythmical attacks deliberately placed between the metrical cracks, Hvoslef keeps us guessing most of the time about where the pulse may reside. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the passage between measures 245 and 256: the music splinters into shards of disjointed rhythms. This precedes the incongruous appearance – halfway through the piece – of Beethoven’s un-harmonized theme on the piano (m. 257 and ff.)
The second half of the piece soon accommodates some relatively quiet, although not exactly tranquil music. The many long notes create a different kind of tension and foreboding. The sonic oasis is short-lived. The piano reintroduces the earlier chromatic cascades in the form of low-pitched rumblings, ultimately enticing the rest of the group into a common discourse. After the cello’s initial attempts at sabotaging the proceedings, by the end of the work it is the piano that leads the troupes – who show their reluctant compliance by brief outbursts of shrieking and wailing – towards the end line. There is a short reprieve from this final stride in the form of two extended moments of silence (mm. 419-420 and 423-424). These two unexpected pauses frame a brief hocket game among the players before the piano again adopts marching mode (m. 436) and guides the music to its conclusion.
After the abrupt ending Hvoslef leaves one and a half empty measure. This is one final act of mischief: we are not expecting the ending and need time to realize that, in fact, there is no more music to be had at the end of this riveting, disconcerting composition.
Ricardo Odriozola 19. October 2024
German Preface not available ...
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