Octet for strings

15'

Liza Ferschtman, Delft Chamber Music Festival

Liza Ferschtman, Esther Hope, Ayako Tanaka, Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Jennifer Stumm, Tomoko Akasaka, Giovanni Gnocchi, István Várdai.

 

23 May 2017, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam

Wantenaar is the oldest in this company when it comes to writing an octet.

The composer, who seems to reinvent fairytale romance in her work, was asked two years ago to write a trio for Liza Ferschtman and her Delft Chamber Music Festival. She liked the result, Wiegelied, so much that she was immediately challenged to write an octet for strings.

Although Wantenaar's pieces usually come across as very pleasantly ‘narrative’, the composer says there is ‘nothing extra-musical’ behind the Octet. 'I made up a chromatic main theme on which the piece is largely built. It is a modulating theme that is perhaps reminiscent of Bartók's Music for strings, percussion and celesta. Another building block is a chord that slowly fades down and glows, combined with a wavering motive, which is also what the piece ends with. There is also a sweeter, joyous but perhaps naive second theme, which constastes with the chromatic, ominous, descending main theme.

Apart from Bartók, the string quartets of Debussy and Ravel were also sources of inspiration for me. In places, I also tried to capture the grand romantic gesture of an expanding harmony that is always yearning for something, but never reaches a resting point. In terms of form, it comes quietly. At some point, there is more and more movement and it becomes louder and more fragmented. The aggression rises to a breaking point, after which the first theme returns in softer form and the second theme makes another attempt to blossom, but at the climax freezes and dissolves into the first theme, which then dissolves again into the fanning chord with which the piece ends.'