Ellen Ugelvik, Piano

Riccardo Minasi, Conductor

Ensemble Resonanz

Idea & dramaturgy: Clemens K. Thomas & Ensemble Resonanz

No. When Kristine Tjøgersen's piano concerto meets Beethoven’s Pastorale, there are 211 years and 1,270 km as the crow flies between those two images of nature. But both works idealize nature. They depict a constructed nature, in all its beauty and grandeur. The reality of man-made crisis, habitat loss, destruction: It is missing. It is precisely the absence of the crisis that makes us feel it. Perhaps even more clearly, more emotionally. The beautiful, ideal world - it is, after all, a constructed idyll for which we long painfully.

Scene at the ›Schreiberbach‹

According to a description by Beethoven's secretary, the »Scene at the Creek« from the Sixth Symphony is supposed to have been composed along the ›Schreiberbach‹, a short stream that rises in the Vienna forest and flows into the Danube after four kilometers in Vienna-Nussdorf. However, it can be assumed that Beethoven composed the symphony at his desk. And because of threatening floods, the little stream became a canal at the end of the 19th century. The ›Schreiberbach‹ can be understood as a metaphor: For the romantically transfiguring Beethoven reception, for the natural idyll conceived at the desk, for the danger tamed by man. How pretty Beethoven's music sounds! It only tells less about the creek, but much more about us and how much the »untouched« nature touches us.

Spruce forest in Tjodalyng

Summer 2019 on the south coast of Norway: Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen makes audio recordings in a spruce forest in Tjodalyng, at different times of the day and night. She is looking for sounds, ambient sounds that we often overlook. She slows down the recordings of insects, birds, leaves, water, and creaking trees several times and transcribes them. Eventually, these transcriptions become the material for her piano concerto, in which the pianist builds a miniature forest in the grand piano and films it with a live camera. The pianist as demiurge, as creator. And how pretty these little trees look in the piano! As with Beethoven, this is an idealized nature. Only, through the artifice of miniaturization, Tjøgersen's forest in the piano is visibly man-made and as such: harmless. It does not hide its artificial nature. In the contrary, it reveals: I do not exist. I am a product of your imagination!