Michael Denhoff was born in Ahaus, Westphalia, in 1955 and studied at the Musikhochschule in Cologne from 1973 to 1982, cello with Siegfried Palm and Erling Blöndal-Bengtsson and composition with Jürg Baur and Hans Werner Henze; from 1979 he studied chamber music with the Amadeus Quartet as a member of the Denhoff Piano Trio. He lives in Bonn as a freelance composer and cellist, conducted the Akademisches Orchester there from 1985 to 1992 and has been the cellist of the Bonn Ludwig-Quartett since 1992. Scholarships took him to the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1986/87 and to the Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia in 1996.
“The sounds are only images of what lies behind them,” Denhoff noted in April 1990 in his “Annotationen über das Komponieren”. As Stefan Fricke explains in the booklet, many of his works are underpinned by images from literature, music history or the visual arts, above all Goya’s etchings. Denhoff does not set them programmatically but uses them as a source of inspiration and adopts their titles. The first of these compositions is El sueno de la razon produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters) for violoncello and piano of 1982. The etching of the same name, made in 1797, was published in 1799 as plate 43 of the “Caprichos”, 80 aquatints on morality, social injustice, education, marriage and the Inquisition; it shows the artist asleep at his desk, surrounded by creatures of the night that stood for ignorance and mental darkness in 18th-century Spain. Denhoff plays the piece with the pianist Birgitta Wollenweber.
After Desastres de la guerra for orchestra (1983), Los disparates for viola, violoncello and double bass followed in 1988 as his third approach to Goya, premiered in 1989 by the “trio basso” at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. It is based on seven of the etchings of the series “Los Disparates”, made between 1815 and 1824 and published only in 1850, 22 years after Goya’s death; the movement titles take over the titles of the plates, from Disparate de miedo (Folly of Fear) to Disparate funebre (Spectral Folly). In Disparate alegre the violoncello, in its highest register, renders the Spanish round dance sardana like a falsetto, while viola and double bass accompany noisily and uncomprehendingly, as if they failed to grasp social reality. The performers are Ulrich Hartmann, principal viola of the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn, Denhoff and Christian Sutter, principal double bass of the Sinfonieorchester Basel.
Denhoff retains the dark character of the Goya pieces in the Piano Trio No. 3 Op. 74 No. 1 “schwarzes Ballett”, commissioned by the University of Virginia in 1995. It grows from a few building blocks: three chords in the low register of the piano, related to the central pitch C sharp, and a bar whose pulse halves twice (3/4 + 3/8 + 3/16). The strings gradually unfold the chords into melodic structures, and within a fixed metre that treats rests and caesuras as exact units, a counterpoint develops that increasingly opens up the highest registers; since the elements are articulated like ritual gestures, Denhoff does not rule out a choreography. From a sketch for this trio came the Night Piece Op. 74 No. 2 for violin, violoncello and piano, equally reduced but more ephemeral in character. Both are played by the Ishizaka-Trio, the siblings Kimiko (piano), Kiyondo (violin) and Danjulo Ishizaka (cello), who have worked with Denhoff since 1992.
Two once so one Op. 66, the Beckett Moments of 1992, interlinks the String Quartet No. 5 “Since atwain (I)” with the duo “Since atwain (II)” for viola and violoncello; both pieces can also be performed separately. When they are played together, the quartet sits in front of the audience and the duo behind it, and the two groups play seven times seven sound actions independently of each other, with only the entries exactly notated. The work was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s late prose “Worstward Ho”, a passage from which prefaces the score as a motto: “Since atwain. Two once so one.” Here the Verdi-Quartett plays with Ulrich Hartmann and Denhoff. The recordings were made in 1996 and 1997 at Burg Langendorf.