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Piano Counterpart
Piano Counterpart is a rhapsody. The keys are struck
seemingly without aim, like a child tapping curiously on unknown objects, listening with concentration to how that sounds.
But not only singles tones are presented this way in Piano Counterpart. Entire boulders of musical language appear: a continuation
of the piano strings into the history of the instrument, into layer after layer of musical meaning. Piano Counterpart strikes
these layers, lets them ring and excavates them at the same time.
By means of reduction to fewer and fewer pitches at
the border of the instrument, and by a constant diminuendo, the piano strings and their sonorous characteristics themselves
come increasingly into focus. The now uncovered tones are connected mechanically at first, following the given chromatic layout
of the keyboard. But their relation grows increasingly free, and like the loose connections between the ruins of musical languages
in the beginning of the piece, the newly emerging musical figures now relate to one another spontaneously, unpredictably,
triggered only by the musical moment. The piano now “speaks” almost as rhapsodically as it was struck in the beginning
of the piece.
(Hans Thomalla, 2008)
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