As a pianist, moving away from the keys and into the body of the piano feels like touching the bones, flesh and sinew of the instrument. It feels both more delicate and precise, and also more violent (for both player and piano) than interfacing with the keyboard. Steel on Bone is inspired by two types of films: medical documentaries and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. Steel is the material of both the scalpel and the katana, used for healing and for fatal duels. Using steel implements in the body of the instrument, the pianist draws delicate and violent sounds, transmogrifying them using MiMU’s multi-sensor gloves.

MiMU gloves https://mimugloves.com/

i. Allegro
ii. Lento
iii. Molto vivace
Gideon Klein was born in Moravia in 1919, and, like Zykmud Schul, he studied with Alois Hába at the Prague Conservatoire. In December 1941, along with thousands of other Prague Jews, he was deported to Terezín. It was thus in the environment of a prison camp that Klein reached maturity as a composer in his early twenties. In 1940 he had been awarded a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but was prevented from taking this up by the Nazis. He was also an extremely gifted pianist, and gave performances in Terezín of works such as Beethoven’s Sonata Op.111, Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces Op.11, and Janáček’s I.X.1905. The String Trio, finished in October 1944, was to be his last work. It’s a piece of great energy and assurance, and stylistically it’s a fascinating mixture of music inspired by Czech dance rhythms, but also by the more expressionist works of the Second Viennese School. Even by the traumatic standards of music written in Terezín, the circumstances in which Gideon Klein composed his String Trio are shocking: by October 1944, when he completed this piece, Klein had witnessed the death of Schul, and nine days after finishing the Trio, he, too, was transported to Auschwitz, along with Pavel Haas, and two other composers – Viktor Ullmann and Hans Krasa. Klein was subsequently moved to a coal-mining labour camp near Katowice. He died on 27 January 1945, but the precise circumstances of his death are uncertain: he either perished in the mining camp, or as one of many fellow-Jews who lost their lives on a brutal forced march made to accompany the fleeing SS.

Nigel Simeone © 2011

Drüben geht die Sonne scheiden [The sun is sinking over there] 
Trübe wirds, die Wolken jagen [Darkness falls, the clouds are flying] 
Auf geheimen Waldespfade [Along a secret forest path] 
Sonnenuntergang [Sunset] 
Auf dem Teich, dem regungslosen [On the pond, the motionless one] 
 

August Klughardt may not be a familiar name today, but his career as a composer and conductor was distinguished. In 1869 he moved Weimar to become music director at the ducal court, and there he met and befriended Franz Liszt. A few years later he met Wagner and became associated with the New German School, a group of young composers who promoted the progressive values of Liszt, Wagner and Berlioz. But Klughardt was also attracted to Schumann’s music and to conventional forms (he wrote six symphonies). The Schilflieder (‘Reed Songs’) were composed in 1872 during his time in Weimar, are they notable for several reasons. First, there’s the instrumental combination for oboe, viola and piano – an ensemble for which very little has been composed. Second, the poetic inspiration is quite explicit: in the published score, Nikolaus Lenau’s poems are printed above the music, almost like song lyrics, with specific moments and moods reflected by Klughardt in his sensitive musical reflections on Lenau’s melancholy tales of man amid nature. Third, the score bears a fine dedication: ‘To Franz Liszt, in deepest admiration’ – an indication of the warm friendship between the two composers at this time.  

Published in 1832, Lenau’s Schilflieder have been set as songs by numerous composers from Robert Franz in 1842 to Schoenberg and Berg at the turn of the century, but Klughardt’s instrumental settings are notable for being a piece of chamber music that is so intimately linked to the poems that inspired it. Lenau’s poems prompted several great composers to write purely instrumental music – Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No.1, Richard Strauss’s Don Juan and the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No.3 – but Klughardt in his Schilflieder seems to be the only composer to have taken Lenau as the source for a piece of chamber music.  The subtitle – ‘Fantasiestücke’ – at once recalls Schumann, and his influence is strong throughout these five pieces. The first, is marked ‘slow and dreamy’ and the second ‘Impassioned’. The central movement, ‘Gentle, quietly moving’ is followed by the most dramatic of the five, marked ‘Fiery’, and the final piece brings the set to close in a mood of tranquillity.  

© Nigel Simeone 

Bright and lively, this music is like a game of tag between the instruments! August Klughardt was a Romantic composer who turned music into storytelling—full of excitement and emotion.  Sometimes his work told stories using actors, singers and huge orchestras, sometimes it was inspired by myths and legends. This piece treats our wind players like five characters. What sort of story are they telling?

Purcell’s only five-part fantazia (Z745) gains its title ‘upon one note’ from the middle C which sounds throughout. From the first bar Oliver Knussen begins to distort the rhythms and pitches of his model while retaining the fixed C, which thus finds itself surrounded occasionally by very alien harmony indeed. As though out of a mist, the diatonic tonality of the original emerges from time to time to mark the ends of the sections, which follow the same plan as those of Fantazia 7 (Benjamin). During the final fast section Purcell’s music re-asserts itself unequivocally so that the closing bars are entirely as he wrote them.

© Mark Edgley Smith

Oliver Kunssen started work on Cantata at Tanglewood in 1975 and finished it over two years later in London. Knussen described this period as one of ‘considerable frustration and little completed work’, but three pieces were finished: Autumnal for violin and piano, Sonya’s Lullaby for piano and Cantata. Together they form trilogy, of which Cantata is the third and final part. Knussen’s aim was to write something ‘consciously more relaxed and lyrical’ in Cantata than in its companion pieces, while also aiming for a compact structure. After a slow introduction, the music moves towards a frenetic section in which the solo oboe plays an extravagantly ornamented melodic line over string parts which Knussen himself described as ‘manic’. In the coda, a varied version of the oboe theme returns from the opening, now supported by gentle string figurations before evaporating into silence. Knussen wrote that ‘Although essentially abstract, the work is certainly subjective, which fact may encourage the listener to let the music evoke whatever personal imagery it may contain.’

Nigel Simeone 2025

Ophelia’s Last Dance (Ophelia Dances, Book 2) is based on a melody dating from early in 1974, which was among several ideas intended for – but ultimately excluded from – Oliver Knussen’s Third Symphony (1973-79). Some of these evolved into the ensemble piece Ophelia Dances, Book 1 (1975), but this one, which nonetheless continued to haunt him from time to time over the years. After the death of his wife, Sue Knussen, it reminded the composer of a happier time and eventually, on the occasion of Paul Crossley’s 60th birthday recital in 2004, he decided to give it a tiny frame of its own so it could be shared with listeners other than the one in his head. The present 10-minute work – written in 2009/10 – is the result. A number of other ‘homeless’ dance-fragments, related more by personal history and mood than by anything more concrete, are bound together by means of variously wrought transitions to and from rondo-like recurrences of the original melody.

From fabermusic.com

Charles Koechlin was an extremely prolific composer, but much of his music remains to be rediscovered. A pupil of Fauré, he was on friendly terms with many of his contemporaries including Ravel and Debussy, and for a time he served as a kind of mentor to Poulenc. His ‘Trio d’anches’ – Trio for reed instruments – was completed in December 1945 and first performed in a French Radio broadcast on 3 May 1946, played by Paul Taillefer (oboe), André Dupont (clarinet) and André Gaby (bassoon). The first movement is slow-moving and serious and it is followed by a spiky Allegro, its main theme introduced by the solo bassoon and then taken up in imitation, first by the oboe, then the clarinet. The Andante begins with the oboe alone, playing a lyrical idea which dominates the movement. The fast finale is playful in mood and technically demanding with rapid scales and angular rhythms, rushing to an exciting close where all three instruments play together in octaves.  

© Nigel Simeone 

Vivo 
Molto semplice piano e legato 
Feroce agitato 
Calmo scorrevole 
Presto 
Adagio poco andante  

Kurtág scored his Hommage à R. Sch. for the same instrumental combination as Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen, Op. 132, completing the work in 1990. Each of the movements has a subtitle, and most of them refer to the imaginary characters that were such a significant spur to Schumann’s imagination. The first – whimsical and capricious – is headed ‘Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler’s Curious Pirouettes’, a reference to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s character who inspired Kreisleriana. Next is a quiet canon subtitled ‘Eusebius: the delimited circle’, alluding to the introspective Eusebius figure in Schumann’s own writings. After this comes ‘Florestan’s lips tremble in anguish once more’, evoking Florestan, Eusebius’s outgoing counterpart. The fourth movement has a subtitle in Hungarian which translates as ‘I was a cloud, now the sun is shining’, a quotation from a poem by Attila Jószef (1905–1937). It is followed by ‘In the Night’, an urgent and restless night piece. The sixth movement is much the longest, subtitled ‘Meister Raro discovers Guillaume de Machaut’. Raro was the moderating influence in Schumann’s imaginary brotherhood, between the extremes of Florestan and Eusebius. Here the music resembles a solemn processional recalling both the Medieval spirit and technical procedures of Machaut.   

© Nigel Simeone, 2022