Ketil Hvoslef - Kammerspill (1995, Rev. 1996)
(b. July 19th 1939)
First performance: September 13th 1996, Peer Gynt Salen (Bergen) BIT-20 Ensemble conducted by Ingar Bergby
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.
At the time Hvoslef wrote Kammerspill (chamber play/game) the disarray that held sway in the Bergen police chamber was a frequent subject in the local Bergen news. Always alert to the pulse around him, Hvoslef found inspiration in the sinister vibe that emanated from the
press reports. He was particularly amused by one incident in which a woman had, reportedly, gone to the police to complain about being bitten by a neighbour's horse. By the end of the meeting, the woman said, she felt as if she was the one who had bitten the horse. Thus, the apparently innocent title "chamber play" actually refers not to the act of playing together in small musical groups but to the chamber of police.
Hvoslef, who has always been particularly adept at keeping his audience guessing by creating expectation and accumulating tension in his music, goes to extremes in this particular work.
It seems that the entire piece rests precariously on a series of undercurrents that rise to the surface at unexpected times, with little regard for propriety. The material is extremely austere, even gauche at times. The striking opening figure in the winds pops in and out of sight like a jack-in-a-box in the first quarter of the piece. In the final section it has lost its pitch content, only its rhythmical bones remaining in the insistent iterations by eight tom-toms (beginning in
m. 376). A reverse process occurs elsewhere: the un-pitched percussion figure beginning on the upbeat to m. 36 becomes a melody, shared by the clarinet and pizzicato viola beginning upbeat to m. 65 (a melody much resembling one found in the 1980 work Violino Solo).
The grumpy 5/4 rhythmic figure introduced at rehearsal no. 1 also reappears many times in the first half of the work, taking one raucous final curtain call at the very end. At measure 48 the violins introduce a nervous figure played sul ponticello. This later transforms into the, arguably, only lovely melody in the entire piece, played on parallel thirds by the flute and clarinet between mm. 101 and 121. The background for this duet, however, is the aforementioned obdurate 5/4 rhythm. After some aggressive jabs by the piano (reh. no. 4 and ff.) interspersed between the strands of a pleading viola melody, the woodwinds offer a more human perspective on the 5/4 rhythm (mm. 139-143). By rehearsal no. 5 the 5/4 figure has turned into an equally insistent 3/4 figure, with only a strained, long-sustained chord as backdrop. The 3/4 figure becomes a one-note second violin solo accompanied by extremely soft mystical chords in the piano (reh. no. 6-m.174). From here on the music relies mainly on very sharp contrasts: Morse-like figures against short legato chorale phrases or sudden one-
note salvos from the piano and xylophone (mm. 173-202); a pp halting unison melody that is repeated in a ruthless ff (reh. nos. 7-8). The latter reveals an impassive pp piano during its extended pauses (beginning m. 220). This piano figure goes on for 33 measures, entirely
oblivious to the shenanigans that surround it, including a rather self-important contrabassoon (mm. 243-253). The Thai gong makes an entrance with its single note at reh. no. 9. Two measures later a new, jagged rhythm in the woodwinds appears, creating rising and falling waves of sound. With melodic interjections as contrast, this rhythm will carry the music for
the next 79 measures, ultimately breaking into a no-holds-barred ff assault. Against a
background of evenly pulsating 8th notes, the oboe sketches a new attempt at a melody that
never quite gels into a self-contained entity (reh. no. 13-m. 153). Instead we are met with an unnerving succession of aimless chromatic falling figures and a sudden acceleration of the tempo after 363 measures at exactly the same pulse. At reh. no. 14, with the new, faster tempo finally established, the double bass is, incongruously left alone repeating an 8th note tritone in the lowest register before being rescued by the tom-toms, playing the piece's now pitchless opening motif. This is answered by the one-note refrain of the Thai gong. More strings are added and, with no warning, a repeated note is hammered loudly by the entire ensemble (reh. nos. 15-16), as if trying to convince an allegedly stupid interlocutor of the incontestable validity of such a base, simplistic idea (a possible allegory for the way politics function at the top international level?). Four such aural assaults take place, with indistinct mumbling heard in the pauses. The tom-tom figure is now answered by an inflexible sustained chord until, at
last, something resembling relief and a possibility of hope is uncovered: an innocent, almost joyful sounding piccolo plays a rising and falling chromatic melody on top of a lively string group that plays a single chord in repeated 16th notes with unexpected rests (reh. nos. 17-18). (This melody would later reappear in the first movement of the 2007 work Inventiones for violin and piano). When a modicum of satisfaction has been finally established and a happy ending seems to be in sight, the entire ensemble unleashes the ultimate attack on the eardrums
by playing the exact same melody ff in unison, with a relentless snare drum beating on every
16th note, devoid of all pity. This easily stands as the most brutal extended passage in the
whole of Hvoslef's output. A lone cello high note and a ticking tambourine provide the link to three final measures of cacophonous mayhem before the old 5/4 motif closes the proceedings harshly. The typical Hvoslef full stop final staccato note does not have the usual light-hearted effect. Here a book is being closed. A door slammed on our face. As the difficult to translate Norwegian expression goes, "Ikke komme her og komme her" ("who the hell do you think you are" would be the closest English equivalent). A horse has bitten you, you say? And why should we give a damn about that. Huh?!?
Ricardo Odriozola 2. April 2021