Frankfurt Radio Symphony - Christian Ofenbauer: 2 Frankfurter Préludes (Live) (2019)

Christian Ofenbauer’s Frankfurter Préludes (Frankfurt Preludes, 1997 / 98) mark a stylistic transition in the composer’s work. With the benefit of two decades’ retrospect, one immediately hears how strongly and with what astonishing resoluteness these pieces situate this shift as their central musical focus, how they both reflect and tease out the intricacies of the transition. Today’s listeners are in a position to perceive this even more strongly than the audience at the world première on 19 November 1999, the recording of which is documented on this CD, possibly could have – and even more strongly than the composer himself may have realized at the time. This diptych comprises two decidedly unequal parts that, putting aside for a moment the instrumental forces they require, have virtually nothing in common. It is not even possible for the same orchestra to perform them live without a lengthy intermission during which the stage set-up must be changed considerably. Nonetheless, their inner coherence remains strangely palpable.

Up until the mid-1990s, Ofenbauer’s musical language was marked by a strong will for expression that derived its power mainly from contrasts and collisions, from the monumental, the fragmentary, the gestural. After his opera Medea (1990–94), the composer considered this phase to be over and wanted to consciously explore new stylistic terrains. Following a one-year creative hiatus, he increasingly turned away from an intensified, overheated and compacted musicality in favor of a cooler, calmer fluidity – of clarity, austerity, reduction and quiet. Since then Ofenbauer’s music seems to have acquired a new, heightened awareness of time and its passing – as if it could, without clinging to the present, now stretch a moment in time to last just a bit longer.

A commission from the Hessischer Rundfunk, the Frankfurter Préludes are based on a tightly knit structural grid – though one may prefer to consider such theoretical approaches more of a “private matter” of the composer, which is how Arnold Schönberg wanted his twelve-tone technique to be understood. Here, Ofenbauer used a rhythmic pattern as the basis for both pieces that consists of durations with a quasi serial organization as well as a polyphonic, quartertone-inflected harmonic structure with certain shared pitches that are held over from one chord to the next. But his actual concept for the piece lay elsewhere. One could describe it using the image of a column that, slim and intact, extends heavenward in the 1st Prélude and topples and shatters into segments in the 2nd Prélude – and the dust cloud that resulted from this collapse has not yet fully settled.

In just 30 bars and barely one-and-a-half minutes’ duration, the 1st Prélude consists of an accumulation that is literally driven to the breaking point. This extreme situation reflects a thought Ofenbauer expressed in discussions with Heinz-Klaus Metzger, to whom the work is dedicated/ D:rastically compressed in time, since layers are superimposed on each other along the score’s vertical axis, a large orchestra gives voice to the full content of an evening-length work all at once. Five inhomogeneous instrumental groups, each in their own way, fill in the rests between individual, frayed tutti accents with ever-growing expansions until the highest point of accumulation has been reached, at which point the piece suddenly ends, as if torn asunder.

In the 2nd Prélude this thin column topples – in two senses. First, the 84 instruments called for in the score are positioned along a diagonal line through the performance space, though this may take the form of a sinuous line with gentle curvatures. This gives each audience member their own individual listening perspective, with close proximity to some instruments and considerable distance from others, each of which performs its own individual part. (Ofenbauer ensures that different instrumental families – woodwind, brass, strings, percussion, etc. – are thoroughly mixed.) Second, the structural grid itself is tilted and even topples over, landing on its head: taking certain liberties, the 2nd Prélude traces the development of the 1st Prélude, but this time in reverse through a radical time-stretching process lasting 50 minutes.

The long sustained sounds that grow out of this concept, some of which are punctuated by individual indeterminate events, are primarily coordinated using stopwatches. To organize this expanding geography, which fans itself out over time, the conductor makes the use of just a few critical points of orientation. At exactly the middle of the piece (after 25 minutes), the first precisely measured section begins pianississimo, starting from the conductor’s podium and moving through the space to the periphery, then to the immediate vicinity, to the center of the orchestral diagonal line, and, following a prolonged excursion on the perimeter, returns to the center. A perforated pizzicato surface morphs into a noise-laden tremolo before the second large passage with traditional conducting begins at the edges of the space again, which this time quickly infiltrates into the center. The climax begins in the 47th minute, uniting all the instruments “as quietly as is possible” in a densely interlocking texture comprising 84 rhythmically independent individual parts. But this unheard-of density soon begins to thin out – a last breathy pianississimo sigh from the entire orchestra leads to a morendo gesture of the flutes and clarinets, which then disappears beneath a delicate crescendo in the percussion.

Such a technical description of the occurrence that expresses how the 2nd Prélude ends structurally exactly where the 1st Prélude began pales in comparison to the actual listening experience. How the 2nd Prélude gradually pulls us into its slowness and acclimates us to how rhythmic patterns lock into place and then disintegrate, how motions collide or proceed from one another, how a chain of musical micro-dramas with small, ephemeral eruptions – in short, how emotionally rich and intense this music of transition and surrender – of unintentional and so to speak “pure” sounds – can be is a highly personal matter for each and every listener. The development seems to end somewhere between the clouds of drifting chords and the raindrops of individual pitches, in a gently kinetic calm marked by the beauty of cleansed conflicts. The fact that the final gesture conveys some sense of a minor disturbance, that a bit of dust is whipped up one last time, may be a reference to the Préludes’ subtitle: Two Cranes and Clouds alludes to the 5th circle of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Dante sees “the victims of sinful love tormented incessantly by restless storm winds” (Friedrich von Falkenhausen) as cranes in flight. A particularly inseparable couple among them are Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta: her husband Gianciotto surprised his brother and Francesca while they were committing adultery and, according to the story, killed them both with one blow – their sudden death afforded no time for repentance and thus sealed their fate in Hell. Damned to eternal love, the couple’s remembrance of their foregone happiness causes exquisite torture, since their flight knows no rest. In his poem Die Liebenden (The Lovers) from 1928, Bertolt Brecht added clouds to the image of cranes that accompanied the birds’ flight “with the same haste” resulting in a static state, a standstill in the midst of constant motion. “So lovers find in love a firm support.”