A new piano concerto, sonified from the underwater data of the Kokemäenjoki river - a tribute, a hundred years on, to Selim Palmgren's Virta.
Written for and dedicated to pianist Laura Mikkola. The concerto returns to the river that flows through the composer's own birthplace - the same river that ran through Palmgren's boyhood, and through his Second Piano Concerto, op. 33, Virta (1913).
I was born in Ulvila, on the banks of the Kokemäenjoki, the river that runs across Western Finland and into the Bay of Bothnia at Pori. Selim Palmgren spent his boyhood on the same river. His second piano concerto, op. 33, completed in 1913 and known by the Finnish word for current - Virta - is a one-movement rhapsody, late-Romantic in language, that grew directly out of those journeys he took along the water as a child.
Virta 2.0 is my response, a hundred years on. The river is the same; everything around it has changed. The concerto begins with data - hydroacoustic recordings made beneath the surface of the Kokemäenjoki - which I have processed through the same kind of computer-based sonification I used in The Reef and in El Canto del Mar Infinito. The deep texture of the orchestra is being shaped by the river's own voice: by what passes through the water, what sediments it carries, what the underwater microphones hear.
Above this, the solo piano - written for and dedicated to Laura Mikkola - traces a line that is recognisably descended from Palmgren's. There are direct quotations and there are submerged ones; there are passages where the piano speaks from inside the orchestra and others where it surfaces alone. The work is a tribute, not a re-imagining; Palmgren's Virta sits inside this piece the way an older photograph might sit inside a contemporary painting.
The concerto continues my interest in composing with rivers and seas as co-authors: the underwater data is part of the score, not its decoration. It also continues my long inquiry, going back to my Oxford DPhil, into how the piano can become a super-instrument - an instrument that is not just an acoustic body, but also a listener, a re-amplifier, a partner. Some of those super-instrument techniques will return here. I am writing this piece during my artistic-research residency at KreativInstitut.OWL · Hochschule für Musik Detmold.
Composed by Selim Palmgren in his late twenties, when he was at the centre of Finnish concert life: Virta is a one-movement rhapsody inspired by the Kokemäenjoki river, along which Palmgren boated during his boyhood. On Palmgren's Piano Concerto No. 2 (1913)