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Traum & Ekstase | Querstand VKJK1516

Traum & Ekstase

£16.33

Usually available for despatch within 2-3 working days

Label: Querstand

Cat No: VKJK1516

Barcode: 4025796015164

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 25th September 2015

Contents

About

Freestyle piano improvisations

Improvisation amongst ‘classical’ pianists is still extremely rare and in terms of public awareness remains virtually unknown. We practice this kind of art with highest artistic aspirations regarding pianist standards (piano movement, playing techniques, tone differentiation, pedal artistry …), even though this is much more difficult than sight-read performance due to the lack of defined practice in procedures, quite apart from the problems of fantasy and invention, styling, memory challenges, appreciation of music texture, and unerring certainty in harmonies.

Striking a balance between an absence of pretentiousness on the one hand and an insurmountable complexity and virtuosity on the other cannot be mastered without continual lightening-speed decision-making processes: what is suitable or needed at this moment in time? And: can I physically play this? Both must be considered simultaneously or sensed subliminally. No hesitation or rectification is possible and this is where the specific difficulties arise.
 
In addition there are a number of further challenges: playing polyrhythm 5:7 in a practised piece might possibly be as easy as anything, but extremely risky when freely improvised ‘on the spur of the moment’; a left-hand ground bass interspersed with rests – Ute impressively demonstrated this – could promptly shift towards catastrophe if one ventured right-hand freely-rhythmic insertions at will. The extemporiser improvising in a concert requires an organism, which handles all the unprecedented music virtually by itself in an instant and much more. The principal task in this spontaneous art form is the combination and permutation of the smallest particles as well as a flexibility at hand regarding preconsciously available basic material.
 
Playing technique without mental guidance is always unsatisfactory – but particularly in improvisations. This music would have to be new or at least contain ‘unheard of’ components, relations and facets. Or is the specific situation of a risky, unprepared and unpractised sequence with its coincidences, disturbances and disruptions perhaps so captivating that by contrast absolute aesthetic yardsticks are able to take a back seat?
 
Ultimately the goal is the construction of an organic, logical and shaped complex, which must adhere to an ‘aesthetic measure’, that is to say a balance between chaos and order, between information and redundancy, between diversity and uniformity.

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