Output details

Alex Hills: After and Before

Premiere performance, Ensemble Plus-Minus, Roderick Chadwick (piano), Mark Knoop (conductor), Kings Place, London, 15 October 2012. Premiere recording on The Music of Making Strange (Carrier, 2013).

The questions associated with the preparation for the first performance and the recording made the following day are as follows:

Is it possible to write spectral piano music? This was the question that Chadwick posed to Hills, stimulating the initial composition of the piece.

To what extent should a performer attempt to temper the composer’s ambitions when the severest technical challenges occur? Every effort should be made to preserve a highly individual structural vision such as this one. Both collaborators understood that this was a relatively unusual situation given the difficulty of combing harmonics with chordal writing, complex pedalling and ensemble challenges; on other projects the ‘transaction’ might be different. But in this era of regular collaborations, performers need to know when to condone seemingly impossible demands; otherwise technical standards will not develop over the long term.

How can the performer’s and composer’s joint preoccupation with historical precedents for spectralism be reflected in composition and performance? Particular aspects of the piece were the focus of close collaboration and subsequent revisions, especially the use of Lisztian materials.

What does the work reveal about sound production? Avoiding too brittle a sound world – for example when the sostenuto pedal is being used to control large sound masses in an intricate way - was a major issue in both the dry acoustic of Hall 2 and the closely-recorded CD. Touch, and again modification in rehearsal of pedal markings plus occasionally tempi, are significant factors; the recording could therefore function as a paradigm for good practice, as well as the score.