"Perplexities after Escher" by Graham Waterhouse (world premiere at Richard Strauss Tage 2024)

On 7 June 2024, as part of the Richard Strauss Festival in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a concert took place to celebrate the 120th birthday of the heckelphone.
This is the world premiere of Graham Waterhouse's "Perplexities after Escher" for heckelphone, string quartet and double bass from this concert, performed by Holger Hoos (heckelphone), the Graffe Quartet (Štěpán Graffe and Lukáš Bednařík, violins; Luboš Melničák, viola; Michal Hreňo, violoncello) and Miloslav Jelínek (double bass).
0:25 Levenkracht/Life Force - Allegramente
3:54 Atrani - Adagio piangendo
6:00 Draak/Dragon - Presto scurrile
7:50 Castrovalva-Moderato
13:51 Kringloop - Con moto energico
© v-i-c productions - Helmut Schwarz
Composer's notes:
Perplexities after Escher was begun in 2021 following an idea of Holger Hoos, a heckelphonist from Aachen, for a new concertante work for his instrument and strings. The work finally took shape in Winter 2023/24, when a first performance at the Richard Strauss Festival in Garmisch-Patenkirchen was confirmed, as part of the 120th anniversary of the invention of the heckelphone in 1904.
The work is dedicated to the memory and work of Kurt Gödel, Maurits Cornelis Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach, and inspired in part by the book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (Douglas Hofstadter, 1979), which addresses connections in the logical thinking and creative process in spheres of pure mathematics (Gödel), visual art (Escher) and music (Bach).
I opted for five Escher prints as a way into the piece, one for each of the five movements. These were predominantly early prints, different from the famous, optical-illusional works of later years: Life Force/Levenkracht, Atrani, Dragon/Draak, Castrovalva, Kringloop. In these early works, I imagined the young Maurits Escher discovering and fostering his talent for detailed and suggestively angular draughtsmanship and on the verge of considering which artistic path to follow: Whether to pursue a traditional route, using realistic designs from Nature and the perceived world, or whether to opt for a more imaginative, surrealist path, challenging the way we humans regard our familiar surroundings.
So too the music veers between more traditional elements, such as consonant harmony, clear musical form and more progressive elements, such as abrupt textural and harmonic juxtapositions and unusual groupings of instruments (heckelphone and double-bass or viola). The music takes the energy of Escher's designs, their clearly etched contours, their focussed lines, as inspiration for a work that ultimately seeks its own direction amidst the stylistic and formal expectations of a chamber music work of this nature.
The work seeks to showcase the heckelphone’s wide range of tone-colour, from the rich, mellifluous qualities of the lower octave to the characteristic "piangendo" sound of its upper register (quite different to cor anglais or high bassoon), accounting in part for the widely varied expression of the music. Additionally full use is made of the near three octave compass of the instrument.
The Divertissement for bassoon and string quintet by Jean Francaix was also in the back of my mind in choosing five stringed instruments as chamber music partners, he double-bass adding significantly to the string quartet to enhance sonority. The six instruments are treated as equal partners, the heckelphone a "primus inter pares", and the musical argument is divided between all players.
Graham Waterhouse
To learn more about the composer, visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_... and/or www.grahamwaterhouse.com/?lan....
To learn more about the heckelphone, visit heckelphone.org or check out the new book at heckelphone.org/book.