Thomas Günther first came to know Juan Allende-Blin as a mediator: as someone who introduced him to magnificent works, some forgotten and never played — not only those of the Russian Futurists. Only later did he become aware of Allende-Blin the composer. For his sixtieth birthday Günther played Transformations IV in Essen alongside pieces dedicated to him by John Cage and Dieter Schnebel; in the same year Allende-Blin gave him the score of Zeitspanne.
How strong the composer’s affinity with the piano is became clear to Günther at the end of the 1980s, when he heard him perform his own trio Silences interrompus for clarinet, double bass and piano: striking was the seeming effortlessness of his approach, the gentle and percussive sequences of notes, clusters, glissandi and bell sounds that stood out, sparkling and weightless, from the other two instruments. Allende-Blin does not regard himself as a pianist, but he received a thorough training, among others with Busoni’s pupil Theodor Kaufmann in Hamburg. His piano parts testify to a profound knowledge of the instrument, its technique and above all its tonal possibilities: limits are respected, plumbed, occasionally transcended.
The programme spans a wide arc. The Sonatina of 1949/50, which the composer himself calls a work of his youth, appears here for the first time; Transformations IV of 1960 stands at the beginning of his own language. Zeitspanne of 1974 is, at almost eighteen minutes, the large piece of the album, and in the Dialogue of 1983 for two players the composer joins in himself: he works on the strings of the grand piano while Thomas Günther sits at the keyboard.
The three-movement Sonatine — fast, slow, fast — deliberately takes up a tradition in its title and sequence of movements; Günther thinks of the sonatinas of Reger, Busoni and especially Ravel. On opening the score he was reminded of late pieces by Skrjabin, such as the Préludes Op. 74: as in Skrjabin’s “technique of the sound centre”, the pitch material is determined by a few rhythmic and intervallic cells. Allende-Blin refers here to César Franck’s “forme cyclique”, which he extended to the chromatic total, not least under the impression of René Leibowitz’s Introduction à la musique de douze sons. The aim is the non-repetition of intervals, analogous to the non-repetition of notes in twelve-note technique.
In Zeitspanne rests, silence and sound events at the edge of silence take on great weight: for twenty, twenty-four, thirty-two, sometimes forty seconds one can follow the fate of a sound, its transformation and its dying away. Added to this are the resonances, harmonics and noise-like clusters produced by silently depressed keys — a spherical sonority the composer elsewhere calls sons brisés. In Dialogue this extension of the piano’s sound goes further still. Rather than preparing the instrument or having the pianist also reach inside it, Allende-Blin brought in a second player: the juxtaposition of two ways of producing sound becomes a collaboration, of two individualities as well. There is no tempo marking; strikingly, notes, chords and arpeggiated sonorities are often repeated, up to eleven times in succession — an insistence that creates great tension.
The recording was made on 5 and 6 May 2003 in the broadcasting hall of the Funkhaus in Cologne, produced by Wolf Werth for DeutschlandRadio, with support from the Kunststiftung NRW.