Heinz Holliger: Violinkonzert "Hommage à Louis Soutter"

Running like a leitmotif through the ECM recordings of Heinz Holliger, and through many of his more recent compositions, is the theme of the troubled genius. The Swiss composer is fascinated by the border zone that separates creativity from disturbance, and much of his recent work, offering “biographical” insights into idiosyncratic artistic personalities, illustrates how tenuous the dividing line can be. On previous releases, he has reflected on the life and work of Hölderlin, especially his later years (in the Scardanelli-Zyklus), and also Robert Walser (Beiseit, Schneewittchen), and has conveyed a sense of their torment, and their inspiration, in music of great power and psychological complexity.

Now, responding to a commission to write a piece for the 75th birthday of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Holliger turns his attention to Louis Soutter (1871 to 1942). Innovative painter and militant pacifist – he foresaw the horrors of the Second World War, and used his canvases as a medium of protest, until his visions of disaster brought him to the asylum – Louis Soutter was firstly a musician, and perhaps the most brilliant violinist to have graced the ranks of the Swiss Orchestra.

Soutter had studied in Brussels, with the dazzlingly virtuosic Eugène Ysaÿe (1858 to 1931), but was ultimately thrown out of the OSR for increasingly rebellious behaviour. His painting, Holliger feels, was a natural continuation of his musical activity, and holds many inspiring impulses for a composer: “His extremely nervous brushstrokes can be translated into pitches.”

Holliger uses aspects of Soutter’s biography to bring order and shape to his violin concerto:
“Soutter began as a representational painter in the style of Manet. The musical journey leads from the fin-de-siècle aura of the first movement to the very controlled music of the quasi chorale variations of the second movement and onto the third, portraying grotesqueries and Dantesque visions. The journey ends in “Avant le massacre”, title of a picture Soutter painted in the remotest corner of Switzerland in September 1939... Going out from his painting, I try to realise a ritual of annihilation. I want to show that music can age, can be sapped of vital energy and end in agony. Soutter has been very important to me, not only because of his biography, but also as witness to his time. He, who would not survive the war, foresaw the doom of humankind.”

Fascinated by the story of the painter's life, Holliger wrote his concerto, “in a delirium”, in just over a week. “The encounter with Soutter, forced me – with my inclination to write slow, static music – to compose exceedingly energetic, rhythmically complex music. A physical, dancelike, motoric music. At some point, I simply had to turn rapid movement, which means a speeding standstill, into sound.”
Central to Holliger's brilliantly conceived composition is the relationship between Soutter and Ysaÿe, conveyed especially in the writing for violins. “Soutter is always the smaller shadow, panting to keep up with the violin giant. That is how he once saw himself in a dream: as a tiny man, scratching away at the strings, while next to him stands a giant Ysaÿe, his hair flooding the concert hall…”

The whole violin concerto, furthermore, is developed out of the revolutionary playing techniques embodied in the Six Sonatas for Violin Solo op. 27, which Ysaÿe wrote in 1923, and the concerto begins with a distorted quotation from Ysaÿe’s Third Sonata in D minor. From the outset the concerto is loaded with detailed reference and musical-historical analogy.

The craftsmanship that brought Holliger world-renown as an instrumentalist is also reflected in his compositional activity, which is finally getting its due. If Heinz Holliger's phenomenal abilities as an oboist and his reputation as a conductor long overshadowed his compositional capacity, this has decisively changed. In a career summary in London's Musical Times, writer Arnold Whittall argued that Holliger is extending the modernist spirit of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern into the present day. Certainly his work reveals a lyric expressionism that links him to those masters.

On this recording, the Holliger Violin Concerto is prefaced by Thomas Zehetmair’s extraordinary interpretation of the Ysaÿe D minor sonata, which the violinist had recorded some two months earlier in the monastery of St Gerold, site of so many ECM recordings. Gripping in its own right, the Ysaÿe composition sets the scene for the Holliger, and illuminates the contemporary composer’s source materials. It is also provides a tantalizing foretaste of a full New Series recording of the Ysaÿe sonatas, played by Zehetmair, scheduled for fall 2004 release.

Austrian violinist Zehetmair must count as one of the most widely praised instrumentalists of the moment, and he recently swept the board with his recording, with the Zehetmair Quartet, of string quartets of Schumann. This disc won a dozen classical music prizes – Edison Award, Gramophone Award, the Prix Caecilia, Diapason d’Or de l’Année and more. Holliger’s Violin Concerto is dedicated to Zehetmair and is, amongst its other attributes, set up to showcase his temperamental virtuosity and his extraordinary expressiveness. Here, Zehetmair’s performance, as so often, “crackles with excitement” (to quote Gramophone).

The strong bond between composer and soloist is rooted in many years of collaborative work. They have played together on ECM recordings of Zelenka, Elliott Carter and Isang Yun, and Zehetmair was also a crucial contributor to Holliger’s “Lieder ohne Worte” recording of 1996. Outside ECM, Zehetmair has very often played under Holliger’s baton and they made, for instance, acclaimed recordings of the Berg and Janáček concertos for Teldec…