Daring to break out of the mould

Thomas Larcher wanted to compose from the age of five, but it took a long personal and musical journey before West Cork Chamber…

Thomas Larcher wanted to compose from the age of five, but it took a long personal and musical journey before West Cork Chamber Music Festival’s composer in residence could think of himself as a professional

AT THIS YEAR’S West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Thomas Larcher is featuring in a triple role, as composer, pianist, and tutor to young composers.

From an international perspective, his career has been that of a slow burner, initially as a pianist, then as a festival director, and finally as a composer who’s making waves. His Red and Green was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in the Spring of last year. A new Double Concerto for violin and cello, with Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley as soloists, followed at the BBC Proms, and he was also the focus of a composer portrait at London’s Wigmore Hall last November. His work as both pianist and composer is well documented on the ECM label, and more CDs are on the way.

He’s actually no stranger to Ireland. He first performed here, at the John Field Room of the National Concert Hall in 1987, and returned the following year, when, at 9.30am on Monday, May 9th, he walked onto the stage of the RDS as the first competitor to subject himself to the scrutiny of the jury at the inaugural Dublin International Piano Competition. He fell at the first hurdle. But, unlike most of those who did make it to the second round, he has been back. He played Stravinsky with the RTÉ NSO in 1995, and over the last four years his music has made its way around the country, being heard on Music Network tours by cellist Natalie Clein, and at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry.

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Who’s the boss? The composer or the pianist, I ask him, when we meet in the old-world luxury of the Hotel Imperial in Vienna, just across the road from the Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

“The composer,” he laughs, adding, “Well it should be the composer.” But he has to juggle. “My life has really changed in recent years. Once I could allow myself to spend a lot of time preparing new pieces to perform. I’ve just had a season where I’ve played quite a lot, and after Bantry I’ll record two more CDs. Then, playing is going away again for some time.”

There seems to have been quite a lag between his interest in composing, which goes back to the age of five, and finally making the step of seeing himself as a professional composer. “First I admired new music, and I thought if I’m not a professional composer I will have to bring new music alive by playing it. And then I created a festival for new music, which grew to be quite big, until, finally, I really dared to start out as a composer myself.”

The festival he founded, Klangspuren (Sound Traces), takes place in the small Tyrolean town of Schwaz, about 20 minutes drive from his native Innsbruck. The first concert took place in September 1994, a day before his 31st birthday, and the experience of being a performer and a programmer has influenced the music he writes himself.

“I’ve given premières of so many pieces and I learned a lot from that about the role of a player in bringing a piece to the public. How important it is to keep a certain edge. To really plan your time carefully. What it really feels like if a piece is too long, when you’re on stage and you notice people are slipping away – it never happens the other way! How important it is to know which situation and what kind of public you are writing for.

“What we are doing is a very small niche, it’s really a very special situation. I know very clearly now that I write for what you might call a normal classical public, where people are sitting in a hall. They are distant from the stage but not too distant. They do nothing except listen, they don’t use their eyes, they just try to follow the language of music for a certain amount of time. And they have a background of having heard a lot of pieces for the same instrumentation, or in the same context.

“They are acquainted with certain build-ups or concepts of pieces, as I myself am. So you play with those expectations, you supplant them, or go other ways. This means I’m pretty much grounded in a certain tradition of listening.”

He’s also concerned to take into account the tradition and inclinations of the musicians he’s writing for, who “wouldn’t appreciate it if you pushed them too far or were very experimental, theoretical or just wanted to make a conceptual point. They definitely want to do what we call music-making. And what I experienced as a player very often is that performers are just replaywright duced to machines.”

But his view is anything but doctrinaire. He talks enthusiastically of the blind jazz pianist Lennie Tristano, whose Line Up involved making recordings and playing them back at a different speed as a spur to improvisation. “Rhythmical patterns, things shifting against each other, have been a constant attraction to me. Think of rhythm and pulse – rhythmic energy is an energy of life, an unbroken positive energy, and it’s so much neglected by new music.”

Larcher the pianist has also learnt from Larcher the composer. “I deeply distrust people who insist on very much referring to the text, who take the text as a bible, and who think there is one really utopian possibility of an ideal interpretation of a piece. I simply cannot believe in this any more. Because as a composer I’ve made so many errors in notating things. There can be so many perspectives on one piece or one phrase or one note.”

He sees the finished score as “only an offer to create music, more or less. You never will be able to notate so that it can really be understood in only one way. And if you could, it would be horrible. It would be the end.”

He describes himself as “not really a very talented pianist in a mechanical way. I’m not good in typing on the computer. And the older I get the worse it gets.” So, as a pianist, he’s always had to shut things out in order to focus. “I really had to be a little bit like a monk.” As a composer, however, “I want to be an absorbing person, who goes out and hears the wind and hears a rock fall from far away, or a special sound which is very dry, appears to be near but is actually a kilometre away, a silence, or a certain rhythm of waves, or someone in a restaurant scratching with his knife on the table. Anything. I feel very much at home as an absorber, a digester of things.”

LARCHER’S INFLUENCES

AS A STUDENT in Vienna, Thomas Larcher seems to have suffered a crisis of conscience, asking himself about “luxury cultural experiences,” what are they for, what do they really mean? And the festival he created was intended to “just to bring normal people to new music”.

On the one hand, “I also admired very complex ways of creating music, of really having sophisticated pieces. On the other hand I also wanted to bang it down, to crush it all. I felt some dark energy – all that sophisticated shit, what should it be? It has no energy, there’s no aggression allowed. It’s a hermetic cycle. I was very attracted by things like Ornette Coleman, or the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Carla Bley, music which I thought had a connection to society and to ideology. Later on even Eisler was an important figure for me, or the conflict between Eisler and Schoenberg” – Hanns Eisler was a Communist composer who famously elected to live in the German Democratic Republic after the second World War, and wrote that country’s national anthem.

Other important influences are nothing if not varied – Bach, the Viennese classics, analysis classes on Beethoven sonatas by Karl Heinz Füssl, the work of Swiss oboist and composer Heinz Holliger, Austrian accordionist, jazz vibraphone player and composer Werner Pirchner (“He was also called the Alpine Zappa, became a dear friend of mine, and showed me a lot of music I’d never heard before”), Dvorak, Bartók (both of them for their embrace of folk music, the latter also for his dual role as composer and performer).

And there was a key moment in the world of classical music, he says, “when a reset button was pressed” by Arvo Pärt’s Fratres. “This was for me an anchor point. When I first heard Pärt’s things, I thought, O God. What should this be? I really wasn’t impressed at all. Later, I found it so daring to create music like this. I imagined how it must have been in the Seventies, when he thought he might never be able to go out of his country, that it would never be performed. It’s totally different now if one of us writes a C major chord. But then, to write religious music in Tallinn was a really radical statement.”


Thomas Larcher is at West Cork Chamber Music Festival until July 7th. westcorkmusic.ie