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AguidetoOliverKnussen'smusic|Music|TheGuardian
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AguidetoOliverKnussen'smusic|Music|TheGuardian
minute, a phrase, even a single chord, like the opening moments of the Violin Concerto.
As part of his 60th birthday celebrations, Knussen's operas are about to receive a new
production by Netia Jones to open the Aldeburgh Festival, where Knussen was Artistic
Director. They are pieces that define something fundamental about his music. His
attraction to Sendak's stories fits the character of his own music - fantastical worlds that
shimmer darkly under seemingly simple surfaces. Knussen's music opens a Pandora's
box of allusions to other magical repertoires - Ravel, Stravinsky, even Mozart - and he
makes his musical language so lucid and so flexible, that every moment in each opera
can open a window into a new world of feeling, a new moment in the drama, from a dog
eating a mop, or the island of the Wild Things.
Yet there has been a price that Knussen has had to pay to produce this brilliant,
bejewelled music. There's no more famously self-critical composer: he has had
commissioned, but failed to deliver, almost as many pieces as he has actually managed
to complete. Composing is both the most natural and the most tortuous thing that
Knussen does in his musical life. Yet in recent years, he has written pieces with a new
freedom and fluidity: the tragic inspiration but poetic brilliance of his Requiem: Songs
for Sue, his wife who died in 2003, was composed in a burst of inspiration ("It seemed to
want to be written", Knussen told me in 2006, and "for a while, as I was writing it, I
wasn't sure whether it was a piece that actually ought to be let out at all, because it is
very personal, and because I didn't want it to be a self-indulgent thing"), the
freewheeling finale of the Violin Concerto, the dazzling kaleidoscopes of Cleveland
Pictures, and - who knows? - the dynamism of a new piece for piano and orchestra,
Interventions, which Peter Serkin will play with Knussen conducting at Aldeburgh.
The only limits to Knussen's music are self-imposed. There is no conductor who is as
catholic in their tastes as Knussen, no-one who has been as generous to a generation of
younger British composers, and no-one who understands the repertoires of new music
as well as he does. What he has already given the world is an output of remarkable,
moving refinement; what's to come will only be even more special.
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AguidetoOliverKnussen'smusic|Music|TheGuardian
One of the largest-scale pieces in the Knussen catalogue, which packs truly staggering,
compelling invention into 15 minutes.
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