Bart Visman: Sables, Oxygène (2008), New Heaven

INTERNATIONAL ROSTRUM OF COMPOSERS 2011

BART VISMAN (*1962)

SABLES, OXYGÈNE

5 songs for soprano and orchestra

Dutch Entry NL NPB/KRO

Title Sables, Oxygène

5 songs for soprano and orchestra

Duration 34'23"

Composer Bart Visman (*1962)

On poems by Saskia Macris

Performers Limburg Symphony Orchestra

Conductor Ed Spanjaard

Soloist Barbara Hannigan, soprano

Performed/recorded April 26th, 2008

Venue Theater aan het Vrijthof, Maastricht

Production NL NPB / KRO

Bart Visman was born in Naarden in 1962 and studied composition with Daan Manneke and orchestration with Geert van Keulen at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. He took part in a course in composition in Poland in 1996, whilst his Orchestrales (1994), a concerto for orchestra, was submitted for the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize and was awarded an incentive prize.

Visman’s works include the orchestral works Sinfonietta and Grande Valse Brillante, the saxophone quartet Tump (1995) and other chamber music works, vocal works such as O Avonture (1999) and the choral piece New Heaven! (2003) and the song cycles Liedjes van een man zonder ik (2004) for soprano and piano and Sables, Oxygène (2008) for soprano and orchestra. He composed his children’s opera De roep van de kinkhoorn (2003) to a libretto by the Dutch children’s author Paul Biegel. Visman is also renowned as an arranger: he made a re-orchestration of Poulenc’s opera Les mamelles de Tirésias for the Nieuw Ensemble and Opera Trionfo in 2001 as well as an arrangement of Haydn’s Creation for chamber music ensemble and a reworking of Verdi’s Macbeth into an opera for children.

Bart Visman: Sables, Oxygène (2008)

To speak with Bart Visman is to confront a paradox. He is a composer who can relate his struggles with artistic dilemmas in precise and well-chosen words, dilemmas that seem to be at odds with the natural eloquence of a body of work that is as compact as it is sound.

‘Is it good enough? Is it enough to follow my instinct, or will my ideas get lost without stringent formal principles, without a structure imposed in advance?’ The paradox is naturally that such seemingly inhibitory factors actually provide more stimulation than hindrance: there are no answers without questions, although sometimes a composer will only realise this afterwards. Visman had more or less dissociated himself from his Septet (1999) for string quartet, piano, piccolo and bass clarinet, composed for the Schoenberg Quartet and Het Trio, when he heard it again recently and remembered how he had created it. His Septet, he confirmed, is the account of a battle between intellect and intuition in which he gradually came down on the side of the latter. It is only now, when the piece appears on a CD alongside two other pieces with which it appears to have nothing in common, that he can see how it takes its place within the context of his entire body of work. ‘It is composed in a different and spikier style that I no longer use. In contrast to the other pieces on the CD, it is music that has been constructed, with each note being carefully planned. At a certain moment I thought that I could only continue if I knew what patterns lay behind my music. Then I discovered that here it was continually a question of incomplete scalic figures and I thought that I’d let them pervade the piece. And so I did, but I then realised that I had to abandon this mechanism in the final movement, for it had become static and minimalistic’. He realises that this was an important step: ‘You can hear that a decision has been taken. No more looking back: the ear is in charge and nothing else.’

The dramaturgical consistency of the Septet lies in the fact that the listener can follow this process as it happens and without a score. After Visman has driven the strongly dissonant, dry and fumbling motivic abstractions that pussyfoot around the opening bars to a — for him — ecstatic and strident climax, a state of tense quiet then prevails. The water level sinks back to normal, the river returns to its bed and nervously articulated string and woodwind figures describe a testament that Beethoven would have termed Der schwer gefasste Entschluss over a minimalist background of pulsing piano chords: the will of the notes themselves and of their composer is now in charge.

To a certain extent, this is an autobiographical work. Visman’s artistic development is the story of a late developer who had to convince himself of his vocation. Although he played violin and viola as a schoolboy and had become obsessed with music at an early age, Visman chose first to go to university, only to discover that what he sought did not lie there. He himself says that he was totally unsuited for philosophy, and even less so for law. He ended up in the preliminary classes of the conservatory, where he realised that he was no real instrumentalist. ‘I wanted to become a composer, but there were no musicians in my family and I felt that I didn’t dare. My respect for the great masters was too great. At school I learnt that everything in Bartók is a question of form and structure — and yet it is still music. Incredibly impressive.’ And just as intimidating for a sensitive ear that feels how high the bar is set.

Finally he dared to take the step. ‘It was an unforgettable moment. Daan Manneke, my composition teacher, looked seriously at what I had composed and I heard him say ‘what a strange harmony you’ve written there’.’

His output is of modest proportions, ‘although I compose a new piece every year. And it doesn’t get easier. I still don’t know how it should be, only that less is more, as Goethe said. I forget what I did and how I brought it into existence the moment that it is done. It frustrates me sometimes, because I’d really like to be able to build on what I’ve done before.’ There is, however, another and happier side to this problem: ‘I do have a type of vision, a type of auditory imagination: if I want to hear the sound of a flute in my head, then I hear a flute.’

He knows where he has then to go with the flute as well: back home, back to his origins. The taboo on tonality, long a highly sensitive subject in new Dutch music, has clearly been abolished; nonetheless, the completely open and unabashed embrace of a harmonic system in Visman’s Sables, Oxygène that Schönberg and the post-WWII serialists had at the time declared to be but a phase is striking. In the five songs of the cycle, set to poems written in French by the Dutch composer and singer Saskia Macris, functional linkings of chords appear alongside episodes in extended tonality as if serialism had never existed. The gravitational force of the tonic in its most literal form is emphasised by drawn-out pedal points that, except in Sémences, the second movement, form a monumental foundation for the high-lying lyrically curved melodic wanderings of the soprano line. Where tonality is usually applied as if between quotation marks in the usual forms of contemporary music, the first and final songs of Sables, Oxygène are explicitly in E flat major, so that a tonally-closed unity is created within the frame of an almost symphonic and symmetrically-conceived form in the best 19th century tradition, within which we find three static slow movements (1, 3 and 5), a waltz (2) and a scherzo-like movement (4).

The familiarity of the language and the palpability of the form both contribute to the surprising accessibility of this song cycle for soprano and orchestra, first performed on 25 April 2008 in Heerlen by the renowned Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Limburg Symphony under Ed Spanjaard. What increases their attraction even further is their excellent orchestration. Visman also has a high reputation as an orchestrator and, taking a regular 19th century symphony orchestra as his basis, he creates a perfumed French colouring that haunts, rustles, sobs, sighs and rejoices with a schmaltz that would take on almost hedonistic proportions in Sémences, an intoxicating Ravelian waltz — if it were not that the poems of Macris also strongly convey the suggestion of dancing light-heartedness. Her words dance with labyrinthine introversion on a volcano of melancholy in Volcans, the fourth song, that understandably pushes its way to the title: against a musical decor of pleasant children’s songs, the serenity of a child’s world is destroyed by an eruption of violence and insensitivity that leaves its victims perplexed and uncomprehending. Les enfants / ils flottent inertes / dans l’éther bleu de leurs yeux: as Macris explains, ‘their eyes stare into the divisions in our hearts.’

The complex and untranslatable multiplicity of meanings in the poems allows no exegetic simplification, as they are concerned with large subjects: space (the limitations of Chartres cathedral, the immeasurableness of the sea), life and death, youth and degeneracy, love and loneliness. The music, however, is conceived on a large scale and renders these themes both lucid and comprehensible with nostalgia and a dull pain that would smack of defeatism, if the shining light in the orchestral sound did not cling so hopefully to life.

The choral work that Visman composed in 2003 at the request of the renowned choral conductor Peter Dijkstra (‘one of my great heroes’) for Dijkstra’s male chorus The Gents is much more than hopeful in character — even ebullient. The composer fulfilled his commission for a religious piece by pairing a poem by the English renaissance poet Robert Southwell about the infant Jesus with an antiphon telling of the infant Jesus at the Virgin’s breast. He consciously removed every horror from the texts: ‘I cut every reference to fire and pain’, says Visman; ‘I wanted to keep the piece light and artless, something like Das himmlische Leben from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. I wanted a piece in which people ate and drank well, a piece with the import that perhaps life is cruel, but now a child has been born: full stop.’ The archaic-sounding, almost jubilant tone of the piece and the refined contrast between ecstatic unison melodies and intimate almost Renaissance-like polyphony justifies De Volkskrant’s comment on the work’s premiere: Bart Visman is capable of giving more that a hazy impression of paradise.

Titre Sables, Oxygène

5 songs for soprano and orchestra

Durée 34'23"

Compositeur Bart Visman (*1962)

Poésie de Saskia Macris

Orchestre l'Orchestre Symphonique du Limbourg

Dirigé par Ed Spanjaard

Soliste Barbara Hannigan, soprano

Eenregistrée April 26th, 2008

Venue Theater aan het Vrijthof, Maastricht

Production NL NPB / KRO

C’est au Conservatoire Sweelinck d'Amsterdam que Bart Visman (1962, Naarden) étudia la composition auprès de Daan Manneke ainsi que l'instrumentation chez Geert van Keulen. En 1996, il suivit un cours de composition en Pologne et reçut un prix d’encouragement du jury du Prix Matthijs Vermeulen.

L’œuvre de Visman comprend des pièces orchestrales (Sinfonietta et Grande Valse Brillante) et un quatuor de saxophones, Tump (1995). Elle contient aussi des pièces pour ensemble: musique vocale, comme O Avonture (1999) et œuvre chorale, New Heaven! (2003); et des cycles de chansons, Liedjes van een man zonder ik (2004) pour soprano et piano, et Sables, Oxygène (2008) pour soprano et orchestre. Il composa également un opéra pour enfants, De roep van de kinkhoorn (2003) sur un livret de l'écrivain néerlandais pour enfants Paul Biegel. Visman bénéficie en outre d’une certaine renommée comme arrangeur. En 2001, il réalisa pour le Nieuw Ensemble et l'Opéra Trionfo une instrumentation de l'opéra de Poulenc, Les mamelles de Tirésias, qui fut acclamée par la presse. Il arrangea aussi Die Schöpfung de Haydn pour ensemble de chambre et revisita Macbeth de Verdi en opéra pour enfants.

Bart Visman : Sables, Oxygène (2008)

Parler avec Bart Visman, c’est se confronter à un paradoxe. Visman est un compositeur qui peut raconter, avec des mots précis et choisis, sa lutte au sein de dilemmes artistiques qui semblent pourtant aller à l'encontre de l’éloquence naturelle de son œuvre, aussi compacte qu’intègre.

Est-ce assez bon ? Suffit-il de suivre son instinct ou les idées sont-elles perdues en l’absence d’un principe de construction contraignant ou d’une forme préétablie ? Le paradoxe se trouve naturellement dans le fait que de tels facteurs, qui constituent en apparence un frein, stimulent l'imagination plutôt qu’ils ne la modèrent : pas de réponse, en somme, sans question. Mais parfois, un compositeur en prend conscience après coup. Visman s’était déjà sensiblement éloigné de son Septuor pour quatuor à cordes, piano, clarinette basse et piccolo, composé en 1999 pour le Quatuor Schoenberg et Het Trio, jusqu’à ce qu'il le réécoute récemment et se rappelle comment il l’avait créé. Le Septuor est le récit d'une bataille entre l'intellect et l'intuition. Visman y prend graduellement et intentionnellement parti pour ce dernier. Mais maintenant que ce morceau s’accompagne sur ce CD de deux autres pièces avec lesquelles il n’a a priori aucun point commun, Visman voit la manière dont il prend place dans son œuvre: «Il est écrit dans un langage différent, épineux, que j'ai laissé derrière moi aujourd’hui. Contrairement aux autres pièces de ce CD, il s’agit de musique construite, structurée note par note. À un moment, j'ai pensé : je ne peux aller plus loin que si je sais quelles lois se cachent derrière cette musique. J'ai alors découvert qu’il y était continuellement question d’échelles musicales incomplètes. Je me suis dit: explorons cela. Je le fis donc. Mais je conclus rapidement que je devais abandonner ce mécanisme dans la dernière partie. Celle-ci est statique, minimaliste.» Une étape importante, reconnaît-il. « Sonne alors la conclusion. Il ne s’agit plus de regarder en arrière, c’est l’oreille qui gouverne et rien d'autre.»