“Pression” is a piece for cellists who are ready to start all over again. Their instrumental skills, all their virtuosity and mastery of classical romantic modern literature are of no help to them in this work. It is all unknown territory, new territory in terms of playing technique.
Pression is pressure that extends to psychological pressure on the performer, which arises in the tension between the necessity and impossibility of realisation.
Hans-Peter Jahn, cellist, dramaturge, and musicologist, has dealt intensively with Lachenmann’s Pression for a Cellist in an essay, both analytically and personally. At the Pocket Opera Festival 2017, he lets us hear and experience this, his half-exposed body, marked by severe surgical scars, exposed in the cone of light as a player of an instrument and realiser of an – almost – impossible compositional vision. And in doing so, created an incredible 12 minutes of intensity and silence.
Pression
for a cellist
Commissioned work for 2017 Pocket Opera Festival Salzburg
Music Helmut Lachenmann
Violoncello Hans-Peter Jahn
